Clip & save art notes

Arts & Activities, March, 2004 by Tara Cady Sartorius

Ke Francis (American; b. 1945). Tornado Hay House, c. 1982. Mixed-media construction; 56 1/2 x 23".

ABOUT THIS SCULPTURE

This sculpture in a papermaking exhibition? It hardly seems possible, with the obvious use of wire and wood, not to mention the surprise silver submarine caught up in a whirling wire tornado. Although it might be odd to think this work was first shown in an exhibition devoted to papermaking, it is not totally out of the question.

In 1982 curator Jane Farmer was assembling an exhibition titled New American Paperworks. Farmer contacted the artist, Ke (pronounced "key") Francis because she knew of him as a writer and bookmaker. Although he did make paper, Francis flatly told her, "I am not a paper maker, I am a paper user." He described Tornado Hay House, and it joined the exhibition.

This sculpture, more than 5 feet high, might be the last thing one might expect in a paper exhibition, but it does contain handmade paper. The black areas are handmade paper painted with tar. The "stuffing" protruding between the spaces of the wood X-shaped door barricade is handmade paper with pieces of hay embedded in it. This is, according to the artist, a "hay house."

Hay houses can be found in the South and other places where hay needs to be kept dry. Sometimes when homes are abandoned, they are reused for dry storage of grain or hay. Damage to the houses was repaired with the least expensive materials: tarpaper covered holes in walls and roofs and water-resistant metallic paint filled in thin roof areas.

The artist has created this hay house being lifted off its foundation, but the image is meant to be humorous and narrative. Francis says, "It's going to be set down in a field miles away, undamaged, and astound everybody. The submarine will land on top of it, undamaged."

Tornado Hay House is one of the first 10 or 15 sculptures that were built in response to a series of interviews Francis conducted while working on a time capsule for a hospital building in the early 1980s in Tupelo, Mississippi. Many of the Tupelo residents had fantastic stories about a 1936 series of tornadoes that struck the town and destroyed many buildings, including the hospital that was finally being rebuilt in the 1980s. Francis realized, "... tornado stories were the Paul Bunyan stories of the South, and I began to think about that as a mythology, that might be a regional mythology that might be bigger than just the simple story."

Francis began his own series of tornado-related art works in 1982, and since then he has made more than 300 pieces in various media based on tornadoes. In Tornado Hay House, Francis uses a multitude of materials assembled in seemingly random ways, as haphazardly arranged as a tornado might haphazardly arrange the things on earth it touches. This tornado has even lifted up a submarine, which is probably the single-most unexpected element in this work. What is it doing there?

Francis explains that he works on several pieces at once. He had already created several boat forms for another purpose, and they were in his studio. While creating the Tornado Hay House, Francis spied the submarine, and tried attaching it to his tornado. It fit. It worked. It stayed.

Then, what are those things sticking out of its bow, looking like some variation of whiskers, quills or lances? The artist says they are sounds. They make the sound of a "high-pitched thump ... like a machine that's got a loose part, [and] every time it makes a revolution, it hits." Francis often references sound in his work, sometimes more obviously than others. He is fascinated with works that evoke art forms, or sensations, different from the one being directly used, such as a musical sound evoking a visual color. Some refer to it as synesthesia; Francis calls the concept, "transmodal," or art that crosses from one mode into another.

Could a work like this have been made 100 years ago? The artist, Ke Francis, thinks not because it is "probably too whimsical. There's a certain zaniness to [the] piece." He goes on to explain, "If you look back in the history of sculpture, you really don't find a lot of light-hearted sculpture. You find it in folk art ... and you find it in Calder's Circus, but generally speaking you're looking at The Gates of Hell and David and Goliath and around the South you're looking at Confederate monuments with ... heroic moments."

"But you don't see a lot of whimsical pieces that imply human folly or irony or humor until you get to our century. An idea of human comedy has existed in other forms," Francis cites Mark Twain's writing, "but it hasn't crossed into sculpture. This piece would have been 'poo-pooed' as not a serious enough subject to make a sculpture about."

"Now the paradigms have shifted, we understand a lot more about human psychology [and] about the necessity of humor in a balanced person's life. Humor is an important element of survival. It has to do with optimism, which is necessary for any rebuilding effort or reconstruction effort."