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Artist Cal Lane at home in Putnam Valley, New York. Lane showed a range of works at the 2006 SCOPE Art Fair in New York, from "rust prints" on paper to cut-out wheelbarrows. Lane turns ordinary implements like shovels into lacy works of art with the aid of an oxyacetylene torch. Lane bases her patterns on scraps of vintage lace or her own drawings. Medieval Tapestry, 2007, is cut with a plasma torch from an oil drum. |
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Cal Lane is not afraid to get her hands dirty—which, in her hairdressing days, occasionally led to admonishments from her boss. Twelve years ago the self-described tomboy traded in her shears for a welding torch, and these days she’s more likely to be found cutting lacy patterns out of rusted steel I beams, like so many paper snowflakes.
And while there are some surprising similarities, Lane says, between cutting hair and cutting steel, today she regards her former career with bemusement. Her mother owned a salon in Victoria, British Columbia, and she says with a laugh, “I ended up getting my hairdressing license because one of the hairdressers in the salon told me that there was no way I’d pass the test. So I went and did it out of spite.”
That contrarian impulse has certainly informed her artwork, which has been shown at international art fairs and the Museum of Arts and Design in New York, as well as several galleries in Canada and the United States. Lane takes industrial metal objects—dumpsters, shovels, wheelbarrows, oil drums, junked cars—and uses a plasma or oxyacetylene torch to cut out doily-like patterns.
The 39-year-old artist says she’s always been attracted to opposites and the tension between two things that are fundamentally different. Her shovel blades, for example, are etched with a decorative pattern, like a slice of Swiss. The treatment renders them useless for their original purpose but transforms them into sculptural objects, a contradiction you can hold in your hand.
With her works’ juxtaposition of feminine lace and gritty steel; ornament and structure; transparency and opacity; even beauty and the violence implied by their creation, what Lane seeks is “a kind of contrast that creates harmony as well as a fight,” she says.
“I’m placing them together out of absurdity,” she explains, because “it’s absurd that they should be absurd. And that was definitely inspired by being a female welder. People would always comment on it, and it didn’t make any sense to me that that would be a strange thing to do.” Her gender-neutral name has been an asset, she adds: “I like that when they look at the object, they don’t read it as being by a female welder, either in imagery or materials.”
Born on Vancouver Island, Lane studied art and welding at several schools in Canada, supporting herself as an industrial welder, and later obtained her M.F.A. in sculpture from Purchase College near White Plains, New York. For the past five years she’s made her home on a sprawling, five-acre former farm in upstate New York’s Putnam Valley, complete with red barn, farmhouse, and outbuildings, one of which she uses as a studio. The property is owned by noted modern-and-contemporary art collectors David and Diane Waldman, who reside in Rancho Mirage, California, and allow Lane to stay free of charge—a unique artist-patron relationship. They display a wheelbarrow by Lane next to a Sol LeWitt in their home.
The rural setting has evidently been an influence on Lane’s work. In conceiving an installation for a series of shows in 2004, she drew on a memory of her grandmother sifting sugar over cupcakes. “I like the idea of residues,” she says. Her series ‘Dirt Works’ filters dirt through lacy sheets of steel. (Miraculously, the works don’t seem to degrade over the course of an exhibition, says Lane—though, she adds, she hasn’t had any buyers yet.) The patterns are based on lace, maps, medieval tapestries, and her own drawings. “It started with a particular piece of lace that my mom had; it was actually a wedding present. But now it’s pretty ratty,” she says. Sometimes she uses a projector to transfer her drawings to her metal surfaces.
The bigger metal pieces—I beams, car doors—Lane sources from the salvage yard, although here, too, she is sometimes the beneficiary of unforeseen largess. After a profile of her appeared in the New York Times, she got a call from a firefighter in Yonkers. He had seen the article and wanted to offer her the burned-out cars on which the fire department practices. One car door can take her up to a month to strip and carve. The shovels, for the most part, are purchased at a local hardware store and artificially aged. Lane torches the paint and accelerates the oxidization process with vinegar. “And sometimes I just use them in my garden,” she adds.
The garden won’t be getting much attention this summer, though, as Lane prepares for shows in Massachusetts at the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park and the Judi Rotenberg Gallery. Luckily, she says, her solitary and isolated living arrangement affords her the time and space to set her own rhythm. “Sometimes I work all day and all night; sometimes I leave it for a few days,” she says. “I’m very happy doing my own thing.”
Lane’s work will be on view in the exhibition Radical Lace and Subversive Knitting, at the Indiana State Museum in Indianapolis through August 31. Lane will have solo shows at the Judi Rotenberg Gallery in Boston, June 5 through July 5, and from August 9 at the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, in Lincoln, Massachusetts.
Sarah P. Hanson is an editor at Assouline Publishing and has written for ARTnews.
Photography Credits:
1. "Phil Mansfield /The New York Times/Redux"
3 - 5. © Cal Lane/courtesy Michael Foley Gallery
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