Art as an Encounter: The Sculpture of Tom Stancliffe

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

William Butler Yeats: The Second Coming, published in 1920

As a child, Tom Stancliffe explored a drainage area near his home in Rockford, Illinois and discovered pieces of fossilized coral scattered among the limestone rocks. The revelation, provided later by his parents, that the honeycomb-like objects were once part of an ancient sea that covered the land fixed an impression in his mind as indelible as the petrified remains.

Studio art practice and a connectedness to the natural world have remained constants for Stancliffe in a world that has undergone a cultural sea change.  In contrast to our present era of digital information, and its focus on communicating identity in relation to social and political systems, Stancliffe remains grounded in the world of making visual objects and imbuing them with layers of meaning. He embraces the power of metaphor and the language of poetry; literal interpretations and tidy narratives are steadfastly avoided. Instead, Stancliffe’s artworks invite curiosity and reward the experience of close examination and forming personal associations.  As the artist asks us to consider, “How can simple visual relationships carry content that you can’t even talk about or explain?  Isn’t that more interesting?”

Stancliffe’s emphasis on material and form is also grounded in the Modernist tradition associated with sculptors including David Smith, Albert Paley and Ronald Bladen. Like these and other pioneers of abstract modern sculpture, Stancliffe is captivated by how forms dissipate and change with size and how the interplay of light can shift the experience as a viewer.  The artist responds to the immediacy of metal and revels in an aptitude, honed over decades, to develop the form and concept for his artworks simultaneously.  He plays with different scales, often within a single work.

The land is his muse. Thirty-five years ago, Stancliffe’s family acquired 10 acres of farmland in rural New Hartford, Iowa and close to the University of Northern Iowa (UNI) in Cedar Falls, where the sculptor taught for more than three decades. Over time, he has grown accustomed to producing monumental sculpture among the surrounding family farms and Iowa cornfields, citing place as the underlying context for many of his works.  From his studio near the west fork of the Cedar River, Stancliffe can also observe the subtleties of the Midwest landscape, including the ever-shifting light and melting snow across the fallow fields in late winter.  The Iowa horizon has been a continual influence. “It anchors me, in a sense, literally and metaphorically,” the artist said.

Tom Stancliffe: Drift represents the artist’s first career retrospective, following numerous museum and gallery exhibitions earlier in his career and a focus on producing site-specific public artworks over the past three decades. The earliest works of art in this exhibit date to 1985, when Stancliffe worked as a studio assistant at Northern Illinois University and shared space with artist Bruce White (whose work Carom sits near the Black Engineering Building on the Iowa State University campus). Stancliffe was already deeply interested in public art at that time; by the 1990s, it had consumed his life and artistic practice. Over this decade, Stancliffe produced many enduring works in bronze and steel, including a 35-foot tall monument, titled Freedom Flame, commissioned by the State of Iowa for the World War II Memorial Plaza on the Iowa State Capitol grounds in Des Moines.

One of Stancliffe’s most significant commissions came in 2002, when he won a competition to create a sculptural gateway for the Eastern Iowa Airport. He based his concept on the innovation of human flight and the discovery that the Wright brothers had lived for a time in Cedar Rapids. To Wing, completed four years later, was the artist’s first opportunity to work on a monumental scale. To fabricate the three massive steel elements, which weighed 25 tons, he doubled his workshop and added a set of hoists. Welded forms were then transported on semi-trailer trucks and assembled on site. Other commissions for iconic, large-scale public works of art followed, including for the Roy J. Carver Co-Laboratory at Iowa State University (Glean III, 2005), Iowa Western Community College in Fort Dodge (Axiom, 2010) and the corporate headquarters for Workiva in Ames (Prairie, 2014). As Stancliffe’s reputation and expertise grew, he was frequently engaged as a public art consultant and worked closely with many public collections, including University Museums at Iowa State University.

Around 2011, Stancliffe developed the idea for the UNI Public Art Incubator, which he directed until his retirement in 2020.  The program provides undergraduate and graduate students with opportunities to assist in the design and fabrication of commissioned public artworks, working alongside faculty and visiting artists. The program now serves as a resource for all three Regents universities and communities across Iowa.

With his university career and focus on large-scale commissioned sculpture behind him, Stancliffe’s latest body of work reflects a return to the studio and to more personal themes and subject matter.  Stancliffe’s interest in the course of natural and human history, intertwined with moments from his own life, inform many of the work of art in this exhibition.

Often, intuited visual metaphors inhabit dream-like landscapes that bridge the past and present. In Distant Sky, for instance, a whale floats improbably above the earth, calling to mind for Stancliffe another childhood memory of playing baseball and watching a silver Goodyear blimp hovering high above him in the outfield.  In another still life from the same series, a miniature bull elk rests precariously on a single branch – a frequent motif in Stancliffe’s work – signaling the fragility of nature as well as the possibility for rebirth.  Here, Stancliffe acknowledges the tradition of vanitas, or symbolic representations of the fleeting nature of life and our earthly desires, that appears throughout art history. The use of symbolism is also apparent in Burden, which depicts a solitary African elephant rendered against a barren plain. While this work of art requires no context to appreciate its visual qualities, the addition of a single, pristine white piece of cornice evokes a sense of grand buildings and the continent’s colonial history. The crow, often associated with death as well as with wisdom in many Native American cultures, is another recurring theme.

 Stancliffe’s latest body of work also demonstrates decades of accumulated acumen in making visual art. Stancliffe rediscovered his love of drawing at UNI and continues to call upon his training in intaglio printmaking to render naturalistic imagery upon the surface of his metal sculptures.  As noted by exhibition curator Sydney Marshall, the particular way that Stancliffe uses and applies patina – a thin layer of oxides that forms on the surface of metal through a controlled chemical reaction – is unique to his artistic practice and allows the artist to develop the surface of his metal wall sculptures almost as a painter might build up layers on a canvas.

Across Stancliffe’s body of work, a preoccupation with memory and a concern for the effects of human activity on our planet are common themes. A self-professed tendency towards doubt and skepticism are squared with an abiding faith in and love for the natural world. As the artist has described, his pursuit is to “retrieve a feeling”, rather than a specific story; to illustrate this point, he recalled an experience of walking late at night with his wife in the forest and how he felt upon encountering an oak tree bathed in moonlight.  It’s this sense of being alive and in communion with a particular time and place, while acknowledging the inevitability of change in any environment, that animates most of his artworks and thoughts now.  As the artist has said, “Whatever you remember is no longer, whether it’s a moment, or the person, or a place or the thing. What you experience is always changing.”

David Schmitz, 2023