Sculptures

"I grew up in northern New Jersey on the New York State border near the base of the Ramapo Mountains with a stream a few houses down from where I lived. As children, my cousins, who lived on the same street, spent hours playing in the woods and the stream, building things with the available fallen branches and rocks and giving me an appreciation of using our natural resources responsibly. In high school, I became interested in working with wood and eventually went on to study woodworking in art school. Wood is still my primary medium, and I find the raw material for many of my sculptures from wood that I find while hiking or driving. In this area of the country, many houses are made of wood. I use the archetypal house form as a metaphor for human experiences to invoke memories that reveal themselves as profoundly personal and universally resonant"

Michael Wolf is an NYC area artist whose work encompasses sculpture, installation, and drawing. Inspired by architectural forms, he uses them as a metaphor for the human experience. The desire for shelter physically and psychologically permeates his work. Wolf uses wood, stone, metal, and gold leaf to create contemporary art with an ongoing dialogue with history.

RECOGNITION

Eileen S. Kaminsky Family Foundation, Residency at Mana Contemporary 2020 NJ State Council on the Arts, Individual Fellowship Grant 1990 Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, Fellowship Grant 1998 Robert Rauschenberg: The Power of Art Award, 1997 Monmouth Museum, Honorable Mention 34th Annual Juried Art Exhibition 2012 Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, Mini-Grants 1999-2008 NJ State Council on the Arts, Residency Artist-Teacher Institute 1996 Sam Maloof Scholarship, Anderson Ranch Arts Center 1988 Sculptors Guild, Board Member 2014 - current  

A New Jersey native, I have lived in the Highlands region for most of my life. My work spans a variety of media including sculpture, installation, audio, video, and photography. It is driven by a deep connection to nature, concern for the environment, and an interest in non-traditional art spaces. 

I have an ongoing contemplative walking practice that involves the creation of ephemeral, site specific sculptural works assembled from carefully gathered natural materials. I create “circle meditations” on my walks and leave them for human and more-than-human others to find. Ultimately they will be washed or blown away, or changed by natural processes. These pieces allude to impermanence, interconnectedness, and attunement. 

As a result of much time spent in nature, I have developed a process and approach for a “walking-within” practice intended to foster a thoughtful relationship that is healing, consensual, and reciprocal and have shared this practice on guided walks. Recently, I have directed my footsteps inward from an outer, physical process to an inner, metaphorical one, and begun to retrace my own life path.

I have kept a diary or journal for most of my life and have boxes of them that I’ve often wondered what to do with in the long term. I have started to transform them into twelve clay vessels each, that are placed in a circle. The circle is rich in the symbolism of unity, wholeness, and eternity. It is non-linear and anti-hierarchical, and in this iteration, it represents life cycles, time, a clock, a calendar, lunar cycles, planets.

Each journal is transformed using a different process or ritual, encased in wild New Jersey clay, and often stamped with the dates it was written. The ceramic techniques vary as well as the firing methods. Before altering the journals, I read them and transcribe excerpts from each entry. These become written or audio poems that accompany the journals in their new forms.