Interview with Stephen Fitz-Gerald
Stephen Fitz-Gerald is an artist of many mediums, but most notably a sculptor. Born into a family of artists and intellectuals, Stephen's creative aspirations were nurtured from his youngest years, allowing him to first learn metal-working from his father at only age eight. Although his steel work is not a sole obsession in his art, those sculptural pieces and practical creations are strong, bearing witness to the power of both steel and family legacy..
You work with a variety of mediums with a broad spectrum of artistic influences, and have said that you like to work from very organic mind set, deeply influenced by nature, environment, and Sacred Geometry. Does your work with Steel hold a specific significance or symbolism to you?
In some ways, yes. My last four direct descendants worked with fire on a daily basis. My Great Grandfather was a stoker on a train, my grandfather sold ingots of pig iron, and my father was a metal sculptor and welded on a daily basis as I do. I think metal working has a long tradition in my blood (Celtic) and always a close association with fire. Metal in general and steel specifically is a very plastic medium, malleable and manipulable in a hundred ways. All one need do is warm it up a little or massage it lightly with a hammer,(as my father used to say). To me it is akin to many of the processes of ALCHEMY. One need only look at any one of my figurative pieces and realize that in alchemical terms, it is but 100 lbs of a gross material. By the overlay of the template of my consciousness, wit and wisdom, I am able to "change it into gold" by presenting it in a form that transcends its crude status. It is the perfect material to make lasting artworks.
I recently fabricated a RIGHT HUMAN FEMUR in stainless steel. My intention was not to create a prosthetic device but rather an ARTISTIC INTERPRETATION. So at some point you realize you must balance the input of both the scientist and the artist. I stopped short of rendering a laboratory model, while utilizing stainless steel and strategically choosing where to grind and polish and where to leave it relatively rough as ARTISTIC techniques of INTERPRETATION. There is no doubt in my mind that an anatomist could, if pressed to, use the piece to teach a lecture about the femur, but at the same time take it home and mount it on the wall as a sublime example of Nature's exquisite engineering rendered as an art piece. The very fact that it's made of stainless steel, adds I think to the IMPACT of it being seen as an art piece.
Note: Since completing and posting images of the femur online, I have received many queries about whether I might do the whole human skeleton. To do the complete human body with the same attention to detail and accuracy would require a commission of 120K and a year to 18 months target date for delivery. The femur is the largest and strongest bone in the human body. As such it was relatively easy to fabricate in stainless steel compared to the complexity of other intricate bones such as the skull or pelvis.
.Steel played a large part in the advancement of Industrial society, and yet you create amazing works of both artistic elegance and functional aesthetic. Do you think the strength and permanence of this particular metal appeals to some anthropological need to create a legacy?
I think every artist has an urge to leave a legacy, represented by their work, whether they know it consciously or not. I have never wanted the responsibility of children and thus the idea of procreation does not touch me. It is perhaps a compensation that I conceive of my artworks as my children. Creation on this level is of paramount importance to me. I live for Beauty in all things and try to distill all I have learned from life and experience in three dimensional objects of beauty. I feel profoundly grateful and blessed that I was able to discover my ultimate purpose at the ripe age of 24 . Steel is one part of the equation of METAL which is an integral part of the repertoire of materials that allow me to express myself in so many ways.
Welding is a difficult and dangerous method of work, yet your father began teaching you at the age of eight. Have the tools and technology developed much in terms of how you work the steel, from those first years?
Yes quite dramatically. One example would be the PLASMA CUTTER. In 1983 I built a monolithic kinetic sculpture with my father for the Harrington cancer clinic in Amarillo Texas. We had much stainless steel to cut so rented what was at that time a fairly high tech cutting apparatus, as big as a car and using nitrogen and electricity to cut the stainless. The same device now is the size of a small suitcase (45 lbs), runs on compressed air, and plugs into a common 110 electrical outlet. Welding too has seen some great advances. I have three MIG machines in my studio(wire feed welders) one for steel, one for stainless steel, and one for bronze. This allows me the convenience of not having to change out everything when I need to weld different metals. Laser cutting for stainless and steel, plasma cutting as previously mentioned, and now water jet cutting which is the most recent invention using a tiny stream of water with microscopic bits of garnet forced at high pressure through a very small aperture, and it cuts just about anything.
Working with several types of metal, what would you say the advantages and disadvantages are to working with Steel? For example, can it be effectively used for very small, delicate work like jewelry as well as for Art Nouveau railings or garden furniture?
Steel readily rusts, it's basically fire just slowed way down (oxidation), and that to me is its biggest drawback. So it is not what one might chose for jewelry but perfectly suited for a forged railing. The modern process of powder coating using an electrostatic charge is the appropriate treatment for steel pieces outside, while lacquers and shellac can be used for indoor pieces that are not exposed to weather. Most of the non ferrous metals and alloys are appropriate materials for jewelry because they do not rust and some like stainless steel are hypo-allergenic which makes them suitable for body adornment and piercings. I initially worked in sterling silver as a child making jewelry but inevitably I ended up with bent or broken pieces, (I'm very hard on my jewelry) so in my teens I started making jewelry in stainless steel, a much tougher material. It's a lot harder to work but it lasts a lifetime so I consider it worth it.
Other than steel, you work with a multitude of mediums, some not sculptural. Of all your work is there any specific piece that you have a deeper attachment to, or hold more pride in?
I feel very strongly in the Renaissance ideal of becoming competent in many mediums. There is method in this madness. Some ideas are better expressed in a song than in a drawing or more clearly portrayed in sculpture than flat work. The more artistic languages you speak, the more chances of you getting your message across. And the positive side benefit of this versatility, which the Renaissance artists knew, is that each medium has an energy signature, and they each tend to stimulate each other. So rather than the effect of depletion occurring, as one might expect by spreading oneself too thin, actually the reverse occurs. There is a compounding of energy that allows a jumping from one medium to the next in a dynamic cycle of inspiration and insight. At this point in my career after creating hundreds of pieces both decorative and fine art, musical compositions, prose poetry and fiction, I tend to think of whatever I am currently working on as my favorite
Pieces Magazine was lucky to come across Stephen's work through the online art community Deviantart.com, which is far more benign than it sounds. Being a firm believer in cooperation and community between artists, Stephen asked that Pieces encourage any artists reading to visit. In the meantime, Stephen's work can be found at his website sfitzgeraldfineart.com