Wood & Steel Sculpture

Engaged with life below the surface, the sculptor calls upon process art to give free reign to human expression. Craggy, jumpy gouges cut by chain saw into oak and smooth, connected meditations in basswood are the spectrum of expression in wood sculptures by Victoria Thorson.

Domino Refinery is the artist’s intuitive reaction to a massive oak round with a square hole chewed through by carpenter ants. Her alterations made with a chain saw and chisel are coupled with a steel platform and a 200-year-old pine slab that was salvaged from the construction site at Brooklyn’s Domino Sugar Refinery.

The 6-foot column Trilogy was a preexisting countertop pulled out of a rehabbed brownstone. It became the basis for three adjacent expressions in basswood, a wood that lent itself to a sliced geometry of planes, smooth refinements, and inserts of color strips.

A series of Birch rounds, to be burned for firewood, are attached to found objects in metal and old wood, splattered or burnished with color.

Artist

Victoria Thorson is a New York-based artist working in wood and metal. Inspired by the artists Ligia Clark, Sean Scully, and Cecil Skotnes, her basswood and steel columns and her sculptures in oak, walnut, and birch are installed in architectural settings including Island House, and Roosevelt Island. Also a PhD art historian, she worked at MoMA where she uncovered the fake drawings of Auguste Rodin and later wrote the definition of Abstract Art for the Grove Encyclopedia of American Art.