DESIGNING METAPHOR
RECENT WORK BY FOON SHAM

For the last twenty years, Foon Sham has passionately pursued his love of material in his intricate wood sculptures, from their overall composition to how each component fits together. What distinguishes his recent work is that he has increasingly used the principles of design for their associative properties to create a complex, synthetic poetry. New motifs, including reaching for the sky, fathoming the properties of light, and harmonizing with natural forms and forces, have emerged. In his deepening study of structure and the realization of a personal language, his sculptures have become more architectural in their reference to building as well as to the human body and the environment. And as before, Sham's process begins and ends in mystery, guided by intuitive insights and his keen sense of analysis.

This newer, more integrated approach animates Houses at Night, an installation conceived during a two-week residency in New Mexico in 1996. With no set ideas in mind, Sham instead drew inspiration from the unfamiliar landscape and cliff dwellings. The centerpiece of the installation was the mountainous Twin Sisters. To fashion the cone shaped piles, Sham stacked indigenous rocks over two steel armatures. Six small houses completed the installation. While the reference to such a recognizable object as a house was a departure from his abstract work, Sham had been troubled by the Unibomber incident in which an innocent looking cabin turned out to be the site of great evil, and wanted to explore this paradox in his work.

Many of the sculptures in Houses at Night coupled an interest in place with an interior light source. This introduction turned the structures into virtual pin-hole cameras that threw abstract projections onto the walls and ceiling. The quirky and rustic New Mexico House, for example, seems to grow out of the ground, while emitting light from its core. Cut yucca stalks create a cantilevered roof, and desiccated cactus branches serve as posts. The walls combine stacked wood scraps and rough, local stones. Sham had previously experimented with light in graduate school. The clever Package Telephone Enclosed (1978) resembled an illuminated skyscraper with a reconstructed telephone as its roof. Presently, it was a fascination with driving by lighted houses at night and imagining their inhabitants' lives that rekindled his interest. While the use of light had been straightforward and mimetic of reality in the earlier work, Sham now sought to explore the effects of light as a journey: the enigmatic reflections in the installation's darkened gallery suggested distant, twinkling stars.

While signaling several initiatives, Houses at Night displayed many traits of Sham's artistic vision that exist today. Foremost is his treating a work as a problem to be solved and as a puzzle for the viewer to decode. His nimble curiosity and meticulous craftsmanship still guide his experiments with different types of wood and surface treatment, whether it be carving, staining, sanding, sawing, or gluing. An ongoing attention, if not obsession, to detail underlines his various methods of assembly-stacking, carving, laminating, and joining. Finally, the ideas of salvaging and reconstructing continue to inform his use of recycled materials.

Going Nowhere (1997) elaborates on the idea of stacking and the memory of his Southwestern experience. Hundreds of small wooden blocks, arranged in concentric rows, form a barrel-like work. From the back, a ladder curiously appears to jut upward. The front view, however, reveals the presence of a found, steel object, wedged in place by a cluster of tiny sticks. Often seen in earlier work, the sticks add a staccato rhythm and texture to this composition, while the practice of grafting a found object onto the main structure occasionally occurs in Sham's sculpture. Here, the ladder recalls the access steps of certain New Mexico housing, but is denied its customary function as the title humorously suggests.

This interest in architecture flourishes in a series of large-scale, outdoor wooden works, which he has intermittently pursued since 1997. Drawing on a ringed abstraction, Spheres (1995), Sham wanted to make a self-sustaining structure that dispensed with the armature of Twin Sisters and was big enough to allow entry. His solution was to stack rectangular wood blocks in graded rows, which he had intricately cut to resemble mud bricks. The ensuing works have been variants of a double cone with an entry and an oculus. Like the two main openings, the gaps between the blocks link outside to inside. Evoking tepee-style dwellings or vessels, the series explores ideas of protection and shelter, while reflecting a desire to connect with the sky.

Building on the single vessels of Inside 20-20 (1997) and 20-20-2, Vase of Knowledge (1997), Sham played with the concept of two vessels in 20-20-3, Join (1999). Like siamese twins, the work overlaps identical structures at their bases, and explores the image of an actual merging as well as a metaphysical symbiosis. For the first time, negative shape plays a vital role in bringing out a body/spirit and earth/sky dialectic. Although Sham does not plan a particular reading of his work, he elicits the active participation of the viewer, in imagination and in body in his outdoor sculpture. Judging from the many inscriptions carved onto the wood blocks, 20-20-3, Join has been widely successful. Its double entry forms a tunnel, and invites traversing. On the inside, the two oculi act as sundials, while stimulating a heavenly gaze. The sculpture also incorporates the idea of unpredictability. Just as Sham had to adjust his original design by adding the top components, the viewer cannot tell the overall composition from a fixed viewpoint, but must instead discover it by walking around and through the work.

Sham's long-standing study of joinery gained new momentum in an assorted body of work done in 1997 and 1998. In prior sculpture, joints had been a practical means of linking elements of an abstract composition, as seen in the dovetail of Vertebrae I (1979), which connects several duplicate units into a giant loop with tails on either end. Here, joinery functioned additionally on an aesthetic level. Joint #1 (1998), for example, explores one of the founding tenets of Western architecture, that of a column's origin in a tree trunk. Sham uses this idea of reconstructing or metamorphosis as a way of relating nature to engineering, and by extension to the human form. The work's primitive, tree-like column consists of four parts. In descending order, a dovetail and a dowel link the top three sections. The bottom-a series of wood blocks or "bricks"-is filled with concrete to lend stability. Joint #1 also displays a new attention to texture and a broadening of Sham's sense of beauty to include imperfection. Its moire pattern, which results from exposed patches of sanded bark, balances the syncopated rhythm of the sculpture's upward gesture.

By contrast, Joint #2 (1998), a sinuous work composed in two parts out of laminated oak scraps, hugs the ground like a slinky snake. Its smooth surface and exposed grain transform the typical revulsion to the reptile into a desire to caress. To highlight the joinery, Sham leaves a gap between the sections, allowing the imagination to complete the composition. This anticipation takes on a sensual quality akin to a being awaiting union with its partner. In Wind from the East (1998), the artist creates a spindly yet imposing structure. Based on a hexagon, six planes splay outward from a solid top, which for Sham loosely recalls an Eastern temple, and tapper into legs. The upper and lower sections are linked by individual threaded rods with nuts and bolts joinery. To suggest the erosive action of wind over time, various areas of the sculpture display a progression of carving as it twists downward.

In 1999, Sham became the first artist from the United States to participate in a three-month residency in Dale, Norway, with the proposal Sculptural Joinery. His spacious and light-filled studio was situated near a fjord and surrounded by forest of birch, alder, rowan, spruce, juniper and aspen trees. Echoing his New Mexico stay, Sham was again inspired by his environment and how it incorporated nature. This time, it was the timber houses with grass roofs that caught his imagination. He translated this experience by experimenting with indigenous woods and incorporating fragments of local maps, marking Sham's initial use of collage. In Grass Roof, for example, bands of map evoking turf alternate with aspen slats to create a channeled roof. Stacked rows of alder sticks form the main cubic structure.

Joint #4, Boat and Joint #5, Elbow, both distant cousins of Joint #2, use a lap joint to create compositions that interlock like a puzzle. Joint #4, Boat displays the property of alder of bleeding orange when cut. Metaphorically, the work fuses aspects of a vessel and geology. Its compact appearance evokes ancient boat construction, while its curve suggests the swelling contour of the mountain. The reference to land is furthered by the work's peculiar staking, which creates overhangs and tunnel-like perforations and recalls a seismic shift. Joint #5, Elbow breaks more at a angle, but again, the gap at the joint produces a dark chasm and a sense of anticipation. Unlike the fully smooth surface of Joint #4, Boat, the two sections of Joint, #5, Elbow contrasts birch with its bark intact and removed. In so doing, the work addresses the idea of balancing opposites and reflects the life of a tree as it goes from its natural state to becoming part of a human-made structure.

The curvilineal design explored in earlier sculptures evolves into an upright spiral in Torvtak, a large outdoor work and the last Sham made during his residency. Its unfolding composition crystallizes the concept of unpredictability that the artist enjoys, as well as the peaceful interdependence of man and nature. A preliminary drawing shows grass on top of a solid, leaning tower. Seeking more interaction, he decided to open up the structure like a shell as seen in a later drawing. The final work comprises six coursed sections out of birch, alder, rowan, and other indigenous woods, which he joined with a hidden series of gear-like mortises and tenons. As in mortarless masonry, each "brick" was planed to a precise thickness to avoid gaps. With bark and moss intact, the skin like sheath generated a rustic effect. For the roof, Sham, with the assistance of local craftsmen, carefully layered sand, dirt, and grass to interpret the living ecosystem of the local architecture.

Sham's recent work pursues the ideas of his Norway residency. Packaged Mountain (2000), for example, echoes the peanut shape of Secret Compartment (1999), and the earlier Rebuild (1997). While the division of the Norway sculpture into two, unequal segments was left a mystery, the new piece exposes its design by means of a gap. Sham later decided to add three rocks to the compartment, which he had saved from his New Mexico residency. From a distance, they evoke a mountainous terrain or rock garden depending on one's interpretation of scale. The work further expresses its hybrid nature by combining alder with various woods from the United States.

Packaged Mountain is also significant in that it represents a more flexible arrangement of forms, a growing willingness to reveal process, and a deeper commitment to honesty of materials. While displaying Sham's calculated harmony, the work bears the original slits and eye-like scars in an otherwise, multi-facetted chiselled surface. Another tower-like work, Looking Back (2000), retains pencil marks and saw blade cuts. Its top layer recycles end wedges of alder from Torvtak, arranged like the aperture of a camera around an open core. Some of the slices have fragments of a Norwegian map collaged onto their surface, while others are exposed. The fluid, zigzag contour continues with layers of four, differently colored and textured woods from the United States. Peering down into the center, it is impossible to tell how deep the hole goes. ÊÊ

Like links in an endless chain or moments in perpetual transition, Sham's sculptures both anticipate and reflect themselves. Drawing on his intuition and intellect, he approaches each design with fresh curiosity and play, while maintaining an open attitude toward outcome throughout the creative process. Renewal and conjoining underlie a diverse body of work that is increasingly architectural and metaphoric in nature. These themes boldly affirm that disparate entities can form a dynamic partnership. Trusting the universe to yield its secrets in small, unpredictable increments, the artist continues to express and inspire wonder, as he seeks a unifying gesture within each polyrhythmic composition.

Art historian Sarah Tanguy, who has worked at several museums and art organizations, is an independent curator and critic based in Washington, D.C. She is a frequent contributor to Sculpture magazine among other publications.

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