Sonja Weber o B A L A N C E
O F
all images courtesy the artist
T H E
This Dutch-born artist finds inspiration in Kundalini yoga, which she evokes in works composed of found objects from the coast of Maine. BY CARL LITTLE
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T E X T U R E
N A SATURDAY AFTERNOON this past July, at her home in West Boothbay Harbor, Sonja Weber Gilkey had prepared a blueberry tart and a pot of tea for a visitor. The summer home she once shared with her husband, the late theologian and educator Dr. Langdon Gilkey, is a simple structure perched on a ledge overlooking a rocky, tree-lined cove. The interior decoration, however, is decidedly out of the ordinary: remarkable wall hangings made of rope, shells, and other flotsam and jetsam float here and there. Some are organic shapes, others, figural forms, six feet or so tall. Before sitting down to tart and tea, Gilkey showed off her latest piece, Hommage à Picasso. She had viewed an exhibition of the Spanish master’s work in New York City and felt that certain elements of her sculpture, including the eye shapes, recalled his figures. Her piece featured fish net, nautical line, lobster pot materials, sisal rope, shells, feathers, wood, and glass. Gilkey apologized for the makeshift way the figure was hanging in a doorway. She said that at her show last year at the Het Oude Raahuis in Aalsmeer, The Netherlands, she had a large space mostly to herself and the figural pieces stood out on the white walls. Several friends at the show remarked that they felt that the pieces were speaking to each other across the room, an impression that continues to delight the artist. In describing her Picasso piece, Gilkey drew on her extensive knowledge of Kundalini yoga, which she has been teaching for 35 years. She spoke of chakras, the third eye, positive energy, and the spiritual dimen-
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Gilkey ABOVE De Vlinder (The Butterfly), 43" x 43". Sisal, 2006. FAR LEFT Hommage Ă Picasso, 8' by 25" by 12". 2010. Fish net, nautical rope, lobstercrate material, sisal, shells, feathers, wood, and glass. NEAR LEFT Soul Traveling, 55" x 42". Feathers, lobster-crate material, driftwood, shells, nautical rope, sisal.
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sions of the human body—“the infinity within us.” She was animated in making the connection between the physical and the visual. Gilkey’s materials come from a variety of sources. Some of the rope was provided by a lobsterman in the neighborhood who could no longer use it due to new whale-conservation regulations. She has collected other materials at nearby Hendrick’s Head, a favorite spot for finding odds and ends of sea-borne and -worn materials. Friends also contribute, which Gilkey finds charming. Her dealer, Virginia Lee, brought her various beach gleanings from a recent trip to Canada. Gilkey is not the first artist to incorpoABOVE The artist in her Charlottesville studio. RIGHT Maman Haïtienne avec son bébé (Haitian Mother with Baby), 48" x 12" x 8", 2010. Brooms, feathers, shells, nautical rope, bait bag, and glass.
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rate lobsters in an artwork. Salvador Dali created a lobster phone and Joseph Cornell featured can-canning plastic lobsters in one of his sculptures. Yet Gilkey’s approach to the use of the crustaceans in several of her pieces is more organic and free-form. Gilkey explained how she creates one of her figures. Working on the floor she forms the basic shape with a long piece of rope and works around it. She adds pieces—a bait bag, shells—and uses crotchet needles to weave in mussel shells or a piece of colorful foam from a lobster buoy. “The piece happens,” she explained, adding that the less directing she does the freer the composition. “I really have to allow it to tell me what it wants. I love that part.” Rope has always been a part of Gilkey’s artistic repertoire. She likes its flexibility and linear quality, but also its symbolic resonance. In speaking of rope, she refers to umbilical cords, life lines, and “the uncoiling of our own DNA.” She manages to do with rope what another distinguished Maine sculptor, Brian White, does with shells: tap its energy and bring out its sculptural potential.
Gilkey likes rope’s flexibility and linear quality, but also its symbolic resonance. She speaks of umbilical cords, life lines, and “the uncoiling of our own DNA.” Gilkey, who was born in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, in 1938, traces her love of rope to her childhood. Life in The netherlands during World War II was simplified. She recalls drawing with sticks in the sand and playing with bits of rope. “You make do with what you have,” she said. Her war-time experience also led to an awareness of the importance of conserving—electricity, gas, natural resources. Interestingly, another Netherlander who survived the war and ended up on the coast of Maine, the acclaimed crime novelist Janwillem van de Wetering, also created sculpture from found materials. Sonja Gilkey came from an artistic household; her father loved to photograph and her mother made beautiful assemblages. “I wanted to be an artist when I was very young,” she recalled, “but there was the war.” At age 12, she asked to go to art school in Hamburg, Germany, but her mother felt she was too young. After attending hotel school in Lausanne, Switzerland,
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from 1956 to 1958, Gilkey moved to New York City, where she took a public relations position at the United Nations. She recalls meeting Eleanor Roosevelt and Dag Hammarskjöld, among other dignitaries. (“They were all so wonderful,” she said.) Three years in Paris followed; then came a stint as an art curator and press lecturer with UNESCO. Gilkey met her husband, Dr. Langdon Gilkey (1919-2004), on the boat from Paris to New York in 1961; they married two years later. Dr. Gilkey, a classmate of John F. Kennedy’s at Harvard, was a professor of theology at the University of Chicago. In addition to writing many books and scholarly papers, he provided testimony for the American Civil Liberties Union in the landmark 1981 case in Arkansas that resulted in the end of a state requirement that creation science be given “parallel treatment” with evolution. After the couple settled in Chicago, Sonja Gilkey pursued her dream of making art, with her husband’s encouragement and support. “He was the one who said, ‘Listen, you are so
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artistic, you’ve got to do something,’” she said. She received formal training in sculpture in the 1960s, first with Freeman Schoolcraft at the University of Chicago, then with Cosmo Compoli at his Contemporary Art Workshop. With the latter’s help, she obtained a grant to study sculpture. She had a studio and mounted many successful exhibitions—“I sold everything,” she said—but she never took the selling very seriously and didn’t keep track of the work. She is more diligent these days, maintaining a careful record of sales and collections. Gilkey’s early work was conceptual in nature and sometimes quite wild. For an exhibition called “Spumoni Village” (after the Italian ice cream) that she and Compoli organized in 1976, she knitted a huge boat with a sail and people hanging out of it. “It was such a riot,” she said. Studs Terkel interviewed Gilkey and Compoli about the show on WFMT. She also created works of a political nature: in the late 1960s she used objects found on the streets of Chicago to create a commentary on the brutality of humanity. Gilkey earned degrees in sculpture and art therapy from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, in 1981 and 1983, respectively. She briefly taught psychology at Columbia College, then established a private practice in which she focused on Kundalini and Tantric yoga practices she learned from Yogi Bhajan. Her husband was open to alternative ways of considering the body and soul, and welcomed his wife’s explorations of various spiritual avenues. “He changed my life and I changed his,” Gilkey said. Dr. Gilkey had deep roots in Maine. His family came from Searsport originally, and there is a Gilkey Harbor on the island of Islesboro. The couple spent a part of nearly every summer at the family retreat in West Boothbay, but only in the past three or so years has the place become a source of artistic inspiration—and materials. A bumper sticker for Congressman Tom Perriello on her car in the driveway offers a clue to Gilkey’s other home base: Charlottesville, Virginia. She and her husband moved there from Chicago in 1989; he lectured at the University of Virginia and Georgetown University. 48
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For nearly 25 years, from 1983 to around 2007, Sonja Gilkey did not exhibit, although she continued to make art wherever she found herself (including, at one time, on the Trans-Siberian railway). She and her husband traveled extensively and lived abroad for stretches, including in The Netherlands, Japan, Russia, and China. She also practiced art therapy, nationally and internationally. In the past several years, Gilkey has returned to the art world, showing her work in The Netherlands, New York City, Charlottesville, and Maine. Her sculptures have gained critical notice. In a review in The Hook, a Charlottesville newspaper, art critic Laura Parsons picked out Gilkey’s work from the McGuffey Art Center’s annual “New Members Show” for special praise. “Gilkey skillfully balances her textural elements,” Parsons wrote, “introducing movement via spirals and carefully draped ruffles.” Last fall, Gilkey also received an award from Pen and Brush, an international organization for women in the visual, literary, and performing arts, for her piece Les Ames En Route in a New York show guest-curated by Stacy Hollander, senior curator at the American Folk Art Museum. As Sonja Gilkey bade her visitor farewell, sending him off with the rest of the blueberry tart, she talked about the need to be open to the world, to live the unknown, to absorb the energy and then let it come out—through art, through yoga, through positive actions. Wearing a turban, standing on a shelf of Maine ledge, she struck a somewhat exotic yet completely at-home pose before heading back inside to her rope and shells and feathers. There was art to be made. ! Contributing Editor Carl Little is featured in the anthology Maine in Four Seasons: 20 Poets Celebrate the Turning Year, edited by Wesley McNair. He lives on Mount Desert Island. Sonja Weber Gilkey is represented by Virginia Green and Associates in Trevett, Maine; Pen and Brush Gallery in New York City; and the Olof Art Gallery in Leiden, The Netherlands. Her work has also been featured in several juried shows at River Arts in Damariscotta. More of Gilkey’s work can be found at www.sonjawebergilkey.com. www.maineboats.com
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