Branching out North Carolina sculptor’s work evokes nest and cocoons

Standing inside one of Patrick Dougherty’s sculptures is dizzying. When you walk through the “doorway,” a tall nest of twigs wraps around you like a whirlwind, spiraling above. In one, a skylight of sorts gives a glimpse of the gray September sky. In another, you can look through a window and see Brunswick residents and Bowdoin College students walking by. Without fail they slow down. Some stop and stare at the six swirly, spired structures that stand 20 feet tall like a castle out of a Dr. Seuss book.

“They look like giant ice cream cones,” a student from Mount Ararat High School said as she stood taking in the scene during a field trip.

For the last three weeks, Dougherty has collected saplings, twigs and branches, stripped their leaves and woven them into tall, whimsical sculptures on Bowdoin’s quadrangle. During his short-term artists’ residency, the North Carolina native has had no shortage of help. Art classes pitched in. Curious children would park their bicycles and start pulling leaves off branches. Men and women from the community came by daily to watch the project’s progress.

“It’s been quite wonderful in the way it’s brought so many people on campus together and collaborating on this project,” said Alison Ferris, curator at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art.

Though it took a little convincing for the powers that be to allow Dougherty to work on the “sacred territory” of the quad, the effort was worth it for Ferris. She had collaborated with Dougherty when she worked for the John Michael Kohler Art Center in Wisconsin, and she knew his site-specific temporary sculptures would complement the natural and structural beauty of the Bowdoin campus.

“I thought he’d be a perfect artist to bring here,” Ferris said. “The Bowdoin College campus has this definite interaction between the environment and the buildings on the quad.”

When he arrived, Dougherty took one look at the tree-lined site and the buildings that surrounded it and knew what he wanted to do.

“The idea came from the rooftops here, the upright towers on the buildings,” Dougherty, 56, said during a break from weaving branches. “I had the idea of making some kind of … steeple-type images.”

When a group of advanced placement art students from Mt. Ararat arrived, Dougherty explained the process. First, he made sketches. Then, as he showed the class, he made a model out of newspaper and put it in a shoebox. He, Ferris, assistant curator Caitlin Nelson, and a group of volunteers collected saplings, grouped them by size and peeled off all the leaves. Dougherty marked off circles where he wanted the sculptures to be, dug holes in the ground, and made a foundation of supporting branches. Then he started weaving.

“If you’re working with clay, you like it because you get some immediate results; this is similar,” he said. “You’re working really large, really fast and you can make it easily. Changes to the surface can occur at breakneck speed.”

Those changes are part of the reason why people keep coming back to check Dougherty’s progress.

“One of the secondary gains to this is the piece is built in full public view and there’s a bit of drama in the building,” Dougherty said. “People like to come by and see if it’s really going to work out. I feel comfortable with the kind of doubt that precedes [the work’s completion].”

For some, it’s a chance to make art, even if they wouldn’t normally consider themselves “artists.”

“It’s incredible being part of the creative process,” said Emily Shubert of Bangor, a senior art history major. “I’ve never had the chance to create artwork before and it’s just incredible.”

For Dougherty, the sculpture is part art, part craft. He started doing these temporary installations 15 years ago, but before that, he had a “varied past,” including work as a carpenter and stonemason – experience that paid off in his current vocation.

“Everything’s an accumulation,” Dougherty said. “Making skills, knowing how to get materials to work together.”

Though temporary, the sculptures are structurally sound. They rest on firm, dug foundations. The tops are built so snow will slide off them, rather than build up and cause the roof to cave in. Each segment is connected to the others, but the group stands freely.

While he has an eye for the practical side, Dougherty also has a keen sense of aesthetics. Once the initial structure is built, he goes in and works the surface, choosing branches of different widths and colors so he can create shading, texture and a sense of motion.

“Although these are sticks and they remind you of nature, they’re also lines,” Dougherty said. “A lot of the ways I use sticks are the ways that you use a pencil. What I’m trying to do here is build an illusion that the viewer accepts when they walk up to look at it.”

Up close, the intricate weaving looks like a multicolored Triscuit. Strands of cinnamon-red vines stand out against thicker taupe branches, and a swirl of thin twigs creates a wreathlike effect where the roof begins. From afar, it looks like the nest a bird would build if it could hire an architect.

“When I first saw it, it looked like a tornado,” Anna Callahan, a senior at Mt. Ararat, said. “It’s sticks and stuff, but they’ve made it into another art form.”

Dougherty’s work has a way of bending people’s perception of what sculpture is, and what it should be. The last time he was in Maine, for the Phish extravaganza Lemonwheel, he built “guardians” that flanked a set of entrance gates at Loring Commerce Center, along with smaller pieces throughout the sculpture garden there. Anderson Giles, an art professor at the University of Maine at Presque Isle, is working to preserve them.

“Dougherty’s sculpture gave the concertgoers a visionary encounter with sculpture the likes of which they’ve never seen before,” Giles said. “Until then, sculpture for them was a bronze moose in the middle of the town square.”

These sculptures aren’t built to last a few years, let alone a few generations. They resemble tops in motion, suspended for just a moment, ready to spin away. They’re wispy and transient and they look like they could just blow over in a strong gust of wind. They’re made of sticks. Eventually, they’ll turn to dust. Like nature itself, the sculptures are ephemeral.

“That’s what we think nature is,” Dougherty said. “It embodies what we think about nature and its indomitable spirit.”