DOUGLAS CULHANE mixed media sculpture

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            In a virtual world, Douglas Culhane is concerned with the sphere of touch.  His sculptures of steel, wood and stone invite the viewer to contemplate their physicality.  His work features orbs of rusticated wood or cages on wheels filled with mysterious objects including steel hooks, disks and wooden balls.  It is a vocabulary of inert force that is separate from the viewer yet invites engagement.  The work does not require the viewer, but makes demands of him or her that are irresistible.  It is this response fraught with perplexity and anxiety that Culhane strives for, what he refers to as the “blur of experience that elicits ambiguities.”  “I want my work,” he continues, “to engage the space of the viewer.  The object must create the space around it.”

            Culhane did not arrive at sculpture late in his education.  “I always had a lifelong intent to be a sculptor.”  Culhane experimented in everything from bronze casting to  stone and wood carving to welding.  His intellectual interests are equally diverse.  His work brings together a synthesis of his education in nature and the sciences: paleontology, archaeology, anthropology.  These are disciplines, Culhane explains, where objects speak.  “As a paleontologist, you find a fossil and you ask it questions.  I work from the opposite direction.  The viewer is presented with an object that asks questions of them.”

            Culhane’s work is also sourced from the environment around him.  He has worked as a welder in New York City.  The nature and structure of steel construction in that environment drew him to use steel in his work.  Equally, he explains, the forests that he seeks out provide inspiration.  Wood is both a material for sculpture and its subject, and provides a way into the natural world from which most people have distanced themselves.  “Since I live in the woods, there is a natural interest in wood and its properties and opportunities.”  The combinations are intriguing and visceral.  One cannot contemplate Culhane’s work without experiencing the temptation of touch—to touch the object or to be touched by it.  “That is the contradiction of my work.  The work is very interior, but since they are objects, they are in the exterior world as well.”

            Culhane divides his time between Cape Cod and upstate New York.  He has been featured in a solo show at Amherst College (2005) and in group shows at the Berta Walker Gallery (2007, 2006, 2005, 2003), Muscarelle Museum of Art (2005), DNA Gallery (2003), The Educational Alliance (2002), Claire Beaumont, New York, NY (2000), Between the Bridges, Fulton Landing, New York, NY (1998), SoHo Arts Festival (1996) and Dowling College (1994).  He has received awards from the Outer Cape Artists in Residence Coalition, the Edward Albee Foundation, the Lake George Arts Project, Yaddo, the New York Foundation for the Arts, The Pollock-Krasner Foundation, and The MacDowell Colony for the Arts.