Northern California artist Carol Setterlund, who was born in Humboldt County and now lives near Healdsburg, has earned a solid reputation for her enigmatic wood sculptures of totemic figures.

On view at the Pamela Skinner/ Gwenna Howard Contemporary Art, a selection of her sculptures and paintings make for an elegant and emotive display.

Her figures take the form of large heads set atop columns of tree stumps with surfaces crudely carved, gouged and scratched so that they reveal many layers of pigmented wood. Sometimes built up with wood putty, the savage yet sensitive faces are anonymous yet emotionally compelling. Their anonymity gives them a universal quality, yet there is specificity in the emotions conveyed.

In a trio of figures at the center of the gallery, one discerns three distinct personalities. “Sordino” has the look of a philosopher; “Hermano,” as his name suggests, is a brotherly type with a faint resemblance to an elderly Fred Astaire; “Deja Vu” presents the wide-eyed expression of a childlike character.

Other works suggest associations with classical and biblical references. “Babel” is a tower of segments of stumps, some configured with patterning that suggests sedimentary layers with marbled surfaces. It speaks, as the title suggests, with many tongues, the head atop the totem deeply etched with care under a halo of tangled wire.

“Mending” is a raw presence with a large head. A long crack is mended with wood staples down one side of the face like a ladder of stitches. “Cut Off” is a large head placed low on the ground with a crown of stones on its bald pate. “Mysterium” is a tall figure with a large head and a necktie of wire. It stares back at you at eye level atop a barrel-shaped base studded with nails.

While there is a sameness to most of the sculptures, there is some variety in the tone and coloration of the figures. “Enigma” is delicate, almost pretty, suggesting a feminine presence.

“One Man Band” is a humorous guy, a little clownlike, with wide-stretched arms ending in spirals of aluminum suggesting cacophonous music. “Sea Legs” is a salty character with wooden legs and a decidedly male physique.

While Setterlund’s early work was drawn from nature and was reminiscent of the works of English sculptor Barbara Hepworth, since the late 1980s she has focused on the human figure as an existential emblem of pain and survival. Her rough surfaces speak of emotional wear and tear, yet the figures hold their heads high with hope.

Stemming from early 20th century traditions and demonstrating affinities with tribal sculptures and the works of Alberto Giacometti and Constantin Brancusi, the works also reflect a specifically Northern California aesthetic associated with Morris Graves and Jack Tworkov.

Setterlund’s sculptures are supported by an array of paintings that again draw on modernist impulses and Northern California aesthetics. Some are reminiscent of works by Paul Klee, Jean Arp and Jean Dubuffet but all are intensely felt and of a piece with her three- dimensional works.

As Bob Hanamura wrote of a recent show at the Sonoma Museum of Visual Art in Santa Rosa, “A sense of history prevails (in Setterlund’s work) like some archetype in a primeval forest. Standing in the middle, surrounded in the round … (the figures) bestow a calming effect, as if these beleaguered forms had endured and prevailed over time immemorial. Battered as they may be, a calm dignity reigns, as if the encounters over time had healed while the inner spirit remains unscathed.”

Well said.

As others have noted, the raw, weathered textures of her pieces are symbols of endurance and survival. As such, they nourish us with hope for surviving our own travails.

Victoria Dalkey

Sacramento Bee

April 2009

 

The Residents of grief—denial, anger, bargaining with God, depressions and acceptance—proceed, following calamitous events, with destined yet chaotic intentions. Any one can occupy the psyche for quick moment or forever. Not uncommonly, two or there can present themselves at once. There is a significant loss in Carol Setterlund’s not-too-long-ago, and she and grief still wrestle. But it is, perhaps, an almost-done contesting—past bargaining to bewildered questioning, past depression to sad resignation, soon to occupy the remodeled home of resolution.

In this show are nineteen sculpture. They are busts of oval heads set of bodily trunks, assembled, totem-like, from found wood and cut log rounds, and carved a bit by chisel and a lot by chain saw (the latter most remarkable given Setterlund’s truly elfin stature). A textural treatment of wood putty, acrylic and acrylic medium, and the occasional beeswax application, invests the surfaces of these busts with an ethereal patina. Juxtaposition with the rough scoring of the wood’s exterior creates a subtle tension, a spirit presence. From seemingly mundane media exudes serenity and vibrance, whimsy and pathos, and overall a haunting grace.

At first take, a sameness, striking yet similar, pervades the show’s totality. But stepping up to and then within the inter-personal distance between viewer-self and sculpture-self, the individuals in this gathering soon appear.

It is an assemblage of nineteen men—venerable and wise—every one scrupulously bald (a hint of the androgynous soon evaporates). Their expressions—quizzical and surprised—excite the emotional tunnel connecting former depression with future relief. There are men once gripped by nightmares and now returning to less fearful dreams. Eyebrows are raised above flat eyes the size of silver dollars. These dark eyes, slightly recessed, refuse our entry yet absorb our concentration. If eyes are portals to the soul, then these souls are a jury formed to judge. I felt as if I—an inhabitant of somewhere else—had walked into an anywhere small town anytime this century, and was being scrutinized, gently but completely.

Yet this chorus of silent inquirers is not void of personalities. With expressive lips and mouths (as in Hermano) tilts of heads (especially Gentle Herald), varying heights (Big Heart at three feet to Aristophanes at six) and body postures (the stubby wings of Shore Bird, the long and lumbering arms of Dance, Love?) each figure project a self. To me, each seemed secure (protective?) in their individual psychology, and in no way vulnerable to outside influence.

It is the gestalt of this show that captures me. First, the sculptures—the impact of each adding exponentially to the collective value. Then, the growing understanding (for someone who has not experience the loss of mother, father, sister, spouse, or children) that there is validation in the process of mourning. And last, knowing when that time arrives that art—mine or others—may be the most accessibly avenue of catharsis.

Sandy Thompson

ArtWeek

May 1999

 

The ancient academic school of formalism dictates that a work of art should stand apart from the artist. Biographical concerns, personal habits, and documented quirks should remain resolutely banished from the mind while in the presence of the artist’s work. That’s all very well and good for the high, sere aerie of academia, but when viewing the heavy-headed beachwood sculptures of Cloverdale artist Carol Setterlund, formalist strictures give way to the simple jaw drop.

Standing perhaps five feet tall and weighing perhaps 100 pounds after Thanksgiving dinner, Setterlund nonetheless snaps on a heavy protective helmet and wields a chain saw to make her figures. She tramps Jenner beaches alone, canny-eyes with a rope, to find her massive logs. And then—like a 21st century pyramid builder, a crafter of Stonehenge, or a Mayan architect—she somehow manages to get these huge, water-soaked burdens across the sand, up a slippery trail, and loaded into the car home, where she’ll drag them into the studio to create tall, secretive busts of incredible solitude.

Walking into a Setterlund exhibit—which is easy to do as he “recent Works” shows through June 23 at the Erickson Fine Art Gallery in Healdsburg—is to be reminded of the ineffable loneliness sometimes found in a crowd. Working from a mythology both private and profound, Setterlund peoples the Erickson’s elegant space with nothing less than 21 relics of the soul.

Primitive, totemic, and brutal, Setterlund’s figures are often tall piled spindles of wood discs built upon each other, topped with a block and towering over six feet. But the “bodies” are useless; it’s the heads that command. Seeming to emphasize the raw intellect of taste and smell and touch over sight and sound, her pieces sport oversized noses and gaping, soiled mouths. Many are blind; their ears, blocked and ineffectual.

However, the sense of sight is most rewarded in meeting these pieces. While the long stretch of Alberto Giacometti’s figures spring to mind upon viewing Setterlund’s sculptures, his work was purportedly made to be seen from a nine-foot perspective—evidently the distance at which he sat from his models when working. Setterlund’s are best seen from the intimate distance of an inch.

Appearing bleached and whitened at first, in close proximity her works are riotously colored, the white pushed back to reveal blues, purples, oranges, pinks—the pulsing hues of the corporeal. The wood is meticulously pitted and worked, hand-knifed into order and then gently salved with putty. One feel an immense empathy for such pieces as Charade, a Buster Keatonesque figure with haywire hubcap hat in mawkish makeup. In fact, one feel an enormous empathy for each of these solitary figures, so like us in their isolation, defects and beauty.

Above all, Setterlund’s pieces bespeak about basic human desire to reproduce, to leave behind a process, be it progeny or statuary. Like the mysterious heads on Easter Island, her works seem to be mute testaments to—if nothing else—at least making a mark on the good green earth during one’s too-brief sojourn. We haven’t much evolved, she seems to report, when beach-drowned wood is still dragged ashore to be fashioned with meticulous roughness into representations of…just plain old us. Setterlund furthers this by adding crowns and wings and breastplates to her figures made from scrap metal and nautical rope and stiffened kelp and old rusty wire. Others’ castoffs and nature’s brusque actions coalesce in human hands to form—more humans?

Drawing from history (Ajax, Minos, Ptolemy, Anacreon), opera (Capriccio), wordplay (Epigram), and fancy (Pirouette), Setterlund creates her own visual vocabulary peopled with fools, freaks, elders, the sainted, the sane, and the sage. Yes, indeed—back to us.

Gretchen Giles

The Bohemian

May 2002

 

The totemic uprightness of Carol Setterlund’s primordial figures, along with their emphatic, massive heads—-much more massive, developed, than their slender, sometimes token bodies—-has been much noted, but what strikes me about the heads is their wide open eyes, staring into space, as though seeing it for the first time. It is the dawn of consciousness that is being depicted, and what human beings first become conscious of, when they become truly conscious, is the space they stand in and that separates them from other human beings. Setterlund’s figures are about the self-consciousness that emerges with this consciousness of isolation in space, and the urge to overcome it through a glance at the other—-at the spectator, also isolated in space. Setterlund’s figures are stuck in separateness, one might say, in the separateness of their individual existence, but their eyes tend to meet those of the spectator, as though to draw his or her reflective glance into their own, at once stern and detached, yet oddly empathic, as though mutual contemplation was enough to bind their beings, overcoming their emotional incompatibility.

Let’s go one step further: Setterlund’s figures have an archaic grandeur to them, indeed, the same regal eloquence as Etruscan tomb figures. It is as though the ancient sculptor caught their first vital, knowing consciousness, preserving it forever in the freshness of an artistic memory. I am suggesting that Setterlund’s figures are also memorial sculptures: their wood has been bleached by death, giving it the chalky pallor of the underworld. Setterlund’s figures are in effect hadean ghosts—noble spirits that haunt the unconscious, signaling our own inevitable material death and higher, reflective nature, which may endure in collective memory. Thus in work after work—Point of Departure, Ajax the Great, Deja Vu, Monadnock, La Primavera, Mysterium—to mention only a few—the head is a bust, separate from the body, which is an altar-like pedestal (a construction reminiscent of Brancusi, as has been noted.) It is aloof and independent, as though transcending destiny, which the material body cannot avoid, as it’s attenuated state suggests.

Setterlund is a wood-carver, but the claylike surface of her figures makes them seem modeled. She is a primitivist with a sophisticated awareness of modernism. The strength of her figures is tempered by the intimacy of their texture, making them all the more dramatically expressive and “touching.” They are symbolic abstractions that seem profoundly realistic. Setterlund’s figures are supposedly full of grief—depression and resignation, it has been said, involving loss and abandonment—but there is a kind of gaiety in Pirouette and Widow Goodheart Studies the Moon. There is even comic irony, as the garishly bright red lips in the otherwise white face suggests. Ajax the Great has similar red lips, suggesting the tragicomic character—-peculiar foolishness—-of his greatness. (Bulfinch writes that he was “gigantic in size and of great courage, but dull of intellect”—a dubious hero.)

The red has faded from the lips of Setterlund’s other figures, confirming their inner silence, which may be the substance of their stubborn presence. Their inner defiance offsets their outer disturbing quality. In a similar manner, the ghostly whiteness that occurs at times, suggesting absence, is at odds with their solidity, signaling their indisputable presence. Setterlund’s figures thus embody existential trauma and triumph over it, as her masterful heads, with the unflinching gaze, suggest.

Donald Kuspit

Professor of Art History and Philosophy

State University of New York

Stony Brook