Full Circle
Sculptor Barry Namm fuses stone and metal,
art and remembrance.
"It's the only form I work with where there's a whole story behind it," says Barry Namm. He's turning around a recently completed sculpture, showing all sides of the chunk of sculpted and polished basalt stone mounted on a metal base. The piece is one of Namm's Healing Circles series, of which he's made 20 or so.
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Sculptor Barry Namm in his studio. |
A perfect circle is cut out of the center of the dark gray rock. One edge is natural, nearly untouched stone, and the other is polished to a high black gloss. People often think he applies glaze to the stones, he says, so sleek is the polished finish, which has the feel and appearance of glass. But the black sheen actually comes from diamonds–industrial diamonds on ultra-fine grinding wheels and sanding belts. The process of polishing a 17,000-year-old chunk of virgin basalt to reveal this reflective black finish goes through many phases and takes many hours, he says, hours he spends alone and in relative silence.
Namm says he started creating healing circles after losing his sister Debbie and then a good friend, Seattle artist David Green, to cancer.
"After Debbie died, I spent a lot of time talking with David, who was then dealing with cancer himself. We talked about everything–life, cancer, death, what's important," Namm recalls. "In that last part of his life, David worked with a lot of circles. They were dances, dreams; his whole last body of work, the canvases were filled with circles of one kind or another. I started working with circles after his death, and it became my way of spending time with the both of them."
Namm's life also seems to move in circles. He and his wife, ceramic artist Kathryn Allen, moved here from Seattle, having bought a house in Bayard last January.
"That was almost a year ago, but I still feel like I'm just getting here," Namm says with a laugh. On the road a lot this past year, getting his work into so many shows, he says he's hardly been in his Bayard home long enough to feel landed. He's just come back from Albuquerque last night, he says.
Namm bought the house in Bayard through Silver City Realtor Patrick Conlin–who, it turns out, lived in the same neighborhood as Namm back in Seattle.
Namm's own connection to the Silver City area goes back a few years. He's friends with John Rohovec and Linda Brewer, who show his work at their Blue Dome Gallery on the corner of Texas and Yankie Streets. They must be good and trusted friends, as Namm and Allen bought the Bayard house on Rohovec and Brewer's say-so, sight unseen.
"We'd been out looking at houses several times with John and Linda, but nothing grabbed us. This one came up and they said it was 'the one.' I said we'd come out and see it, but they said 'No, you don't understand. You have to move on it right now.' It was that or lose the chance. So we bought it!"
Even though the house "needs work"–like a scene out of the movie The Money Pit, the water main broke during the property inspection–Namm is sure he's at last found "home."
"It's all the wonderful people around us, the mix of cultures, how people are so supportive, friendly and helpful." He recalls how the neighbors invited him and his wife over to use their shower when they discovered Namm and Allen had no running hot water, and made dinner for them while they cleaned up. "I found my small town," he says simply.
Born in New York City, Namm started out as an art major at Brooklyn College. After a couple of years, he moved to the West Coast and studied music at the Berkeley College of Music, then stayed on in the San Francisco Bay area, working as a musician and then as a software engineer.
He says he's had three influential sculpture teachers, the first of whom is now his wife. After a one-year long-distance romance, he moved up to Seattle to be with her. Kathryn Allen creates the large ceramic doorways shown at Blue Dome Gallery.
Jesus Moroles taught Namm to work in stone, and he learned clay and bronze technique from Stephen De Stabler.
Isamu Noguchi, the famed Japanese sculptor who created large basalt stone sculptures in the 1950s, was an inspiration, Namm adds. "He worked with basalt when no one else was. A lot of sculptors don't like basalt. Fractures within the stone can cause things to break off. It's unpredictable."
Namm describes the process of how the stone was formed thousands of years ago from lava cooling in the ground, and points out some of the columnar basalt he has at his studio. The basalt Namm uses comes from eastern Washington State, a sign of his connection to the Pacific Northwest.
A six-foot length weighs thousands of pounds. "I love it," he says. "You see it and you just know: It's heavy, it's old and it's solid."
Playing off that sense of density, one of Namm's trademarks is to drill holes clear through a solid slab of basalt. This brings a unique juxtaposition of density and light to the benches he creates–an obviously immovable, solid mass of rock through which one can see daylight and the grass on the other side. One of his benches has just been installed at Bear Mountain Lodge near Silver City. The curve of the natural break in the basalt makes a comfortable plane for sitting, the surface polished to a high, smooth gloss.
Also at the lodge is one of Namm's Stone Tree sculptures. Again, lightness and heaviness come together. Delicately balanced on spare metal branches, the trees' leaves are made of smoothly polished stones of various shapes and sizes. A Stone Tree sculpture also is installed at the small park on Pope Street near Life Quest.
The Stone Man is another theme in Namm's sculptures. A fountain, entitled "Stone Man Family," recently was installed as the crowning glory of the courtyard at The Hub, Silver City's new business plaza on Bullard Street (see Desert Exposure, November 2006). The work features three geometric stone "people," a whimsical representation of a human family.
Namm goes from one sculptural theme to the other and back again, about 30 percent of his work being commissions for extremely large pieces. He always returns to his Healing Circles, in love with the "meditative act of doing" itself.
"What drives me. . .," he begins, then pauses. "I do something because I love the process of doing it. When I was a musician, even when I was a software engineer, it wasn't about the end result. I mean, you can be disappointed with something, the way it turns out. So, you'd better love the process itself, or you're going to have a miserable life."
He suddenly falls silent and runs a finger along the smooth black edge of "Healing Circle #17" on the worktable next to him. "That's what I think," he says.
Barry Namm's sculpture can be seen at the Blue Dome Gallery, 307 N. Texas St. in Silver City, 534-8671. Gallery hours are daily, 11 a.m.-5 p.m.; closed Tuesday. bluedome@zianet.com, www.bluedomegallery.com.
Donna Clayton Lawder is senior editor of Desert Exposure.