Heavy Motion: The Sculptures of Jack Howard-Potter

Like most art school students, when Jack Howard-Potter went through his feeling out period in college, he experimented with a myriad of different mediums in a search to find the one vessel that would ultimately define his vision. And then the Long Island City resident discovered metalwork. He had already developed an affinity for durability, and the perpetuity of steel fascinated him.

“I was really drawn to the permanence of it,” he says. “If the Louvre burns down and the sprinklers don’t work, then the paintings are just gone. Steel is much more durable.”

Ten years later, the artist works exclusively in steel. And while the idea of using a rigid, semi-permanent material immediately brings to mind images of stillness and tranquility, Howard-Potter’s statues nevertheless seem to come to life.

The sense of movement in his artwork is almost palpable. While the sculptures’ surreal nature suggests supernaturalism, the fluidity of the artist’s pieces ground them within a comparative reality. Despite the metal machinations that work at their core, his creations never feel robotic or in any way stilted. In this way, his statues strike the eye like a deconstructed Degas sculpture, as if one of the famed Impressionist’s works has been stripped of its façade, its skeleton left exposed and unadulterated.

“I come out of a very traditional and conservative mindset in terms of sculptures in that I really only focus on the figure,” Howard-Potter says. “[My sculptures] are definitely contemporary art, but they also come from a very classical tradition.”

To create one of his pieces, Howard-Potter grinds at steel for six to eight hours a day. Each piece of metal is bent cold by hand; he foregoes flames or the use of bending machines, both of which he believes prohibit the sort of flexibility he’s going for.

“I actually spend much more time bending and forming the pieces of steel than I do welding,” he says. “It’s a labor intensive and time consuming process.”

It appears that all of this hard work has been worth his time. His artwork can be found all across the country, mostly in outdoor sculpture parks where the sturdiness of the steel can be perhaps most effective – stubborn and unmovable by definition, fluid and elegant all the same.

To see more of Jack’s work, head to his website: www.steelstatue.com.