In Tip Toland’s studio, there’s an old lady curled up on the floor, a shivering girl and a little boy with his hands down his pants. Which is all exactly as it should be.
Toland is a sculptor, whose clay figures utilize synthetic hair and wax lips in their extraordinarily lifelike appearance.
It’s long, hard work, but the result is art that has won her recognition, such as a 2007 Neddy Award nomination and representation by top Seattle and New York galleries. Now her first solo museum show is coming up this month at the Bellevue Arts Museum, and she’s busy finishing torsos and faces.
“Right after my first ceramics class in art school, I jumped straight from a fine-arts to a ceramics major,” says Toland, sitting in her garage studio in Vaughn. Though she fell in love with clay, it took her a while to sculpt seriously with it: first drawing in it, then doing shallow relief work, large wall pieces with human figures on highly surreal backgrounds.
Finally, after receiving a grant 10 years ago, Toland took the plunge into full sculpture. The result wasn’t pretty: “Short, chunky figures,” says Toland. “They’re just awful.”
Realizing she needed training, Toland took classes at Seattle’s Gage Academy, read all the anatomy books she could find, and – most importantly – began using live models. In 2002 she started working on life-size sculptures, and her talent for recreating the human form in all its blunt detail emerged.
“She puts an incredible amount of work into her pieces, and achieves an incredible likeness,” says Stefano Catalani, curator for the Bellevue show.
In her work exhibited at Tacoma Art Museum last year for the Neddy Awards, Toland’s two self-portraits as a baby and an old woman, both putting on bright red lipstick, are intense in their realism. The old woman’s face is deeply lined, her hair stringy, eyes bright in that way vigilant old ladies have.
The old woman in the studio – a different one from the TAM sculpture, from a different model, and part of the six-piece Bellevue show – lies naked, the folds of her gaunt belly carved like Baroque drapery. The young girl, shivering in a yellow swimsuit, hunches her shoulders as only cold swimmers can, and the little boy with both hands in his pants has that blankly innocent expression that goes with the action. A stout man plays a toy violin with a sadly resigned gesture.
As Catalani says, people probably will pass through Toland’s show and think some of these sculptures are real. Yet with some of the figures nearly seven feet high, such realism takes a lot of work.
After finding a live model – selected for interesting body form, such as age or a rotund belly – Toland begins to draw. She then builds an armature out of plumber’s pipe, arranged in the physical gesture she’s aiming at. The pipe skeleton is then packed with clay into a solid sculpture. When leather-dry, the sculpture gets broken into pieces (around five per leg, for instance) in order to remove the pipe and hollow out the clay with tools. After scoring, Toland reassembles the figure, fires it in parts (usually only a torso will fit into the kiln), fixes it together, sands and pains, with the hair and lips coming last.
Her most recent work, which is also part of the Bellevue show, a woman on a swing with head flung back, is actually motorized (it will swing slowly in the gallery) and so takes even more work to create. The Bellevue show, Toland estimates, has occupied two years of her life, interspersed with her teaching jobs at Seattle art schools.
Impressive though Toland’s craft is, however, the real impact of her work is the psychological response it draws from those who see it. Because – and there’s no way round it – Toland’s sculptures aren’t beautiful. Not in the traditional way, that is. There are wrinkles. There are big bellies, slouched shoulders, panicked expressions, looming death. And because it’s all so lifelike, the effect is tripled.
“She’s making provocative images,” says Rock Hushka, senior and Northwest curator at TAM. “They’re going to generate a very visceral response. They’re unsettling, they bring up all these connotations about the body – of beauty, religion, sexual mores – and they lift a veil on parts of ourselves that we don’t want to acknowledge.”
Toland, though, emphatically denies any intention to unnerve. “I never try and make edgy, off-putting work,” she says. “They just come out like that.”
In fact, says Toland, she’s is the model for some of her work (the baby and old woman at TAM, for instance). Now 58, tall and thin with short blond hair, clear blue eyes and a weather-lined face, the artist finds “a bit of therapy” in exploring her own deepest feelings about beauty and physical appearance.
And while some viewers might be unsettled, Catalani has a different response. “There’s a disarming quality to the sculptures,” says the curator. “They almost all describe age or youth, times of innocence lost or spirituality gained. There’s a strong poetic aspect to them. I don’t feel any repulsion, only an incredible attraction, following the lines of the skin carved on as if it were a map. Which is what it is, a map of a person.”
Says Toland: “I just want to expose (the sculptures’) humanity. I just want to show the truth.”
Which is why Catalani chose her for the museum show: “Art has to have an impact, not just be beautiful.”
Rosemary Ponnekanti: 253-597-8568
What: “Tip Toland: Melt, the Figure in Clay”
Where: Bellevue Arts Museum, 510 Bellevue Way NE., Bellevue
When: 10 a.m.-5:30 p.m. Tuesdays-Thursdays and Saturdays, 10 a.m.-9 p.m. Fridays, 11 a.m.-5:30 p.m. Sundays, from Sept. 23-Feb. 8, 2009
Admission: $7 adults/$5 seniors, students/free for children younger than 6
Information: 425.519.0759, www.bellevuearts.org
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