BASTILLE DAY, 2025: SCULPTURE BY STEVEN CARPENTER

Featured this year is the sculptor Steven Carpenter, an elected member of the New England Sculptors Association, Hudson River Valley Art Association and the National Sculpture Society. He has been winning awards in juried exhibitions since 2007. His bronze sculptures explore maritime life, fantasies and dreams, emotions, nature, and human folly.

Research for a monument competition in Portland, Maine, sparked Carpenter’s interest in the history New England’s fishing industry exemplified in Up From the Deep and Fisherman’s Protocol. Through these maritime works, Carpenter captures the dangers and drama of labor at sea: nature’s power, as well as the strength and character of the fishermen, “especially the hardships and demanding conditions that these fishermen endured daily. Take Dory trawling: A sudden storm or thick fog could mean loss of contact with the mother ship which in turn could be fatal to the lost men.”

His newest piece, Blackburn’s Dilemma, depicts Howard Blackburn and his dory mate in their Banks dory caught in a sudden winter storm and separated from the schooner Grace L. Fears and lost at sea for five frigid days, without food, water, or sleep. Blackburn lost fingers and toes to frost bite. His dory mate died.

Blackburn’s Dilemma took over a year to create and the foundry has promised that it will be ready for the unveiling on Bastille Day. Carpenter began it, as he always does, by making sketches, experiments in composition that best conveyed his vision in three dimensions. Elements from each of the drawings informed the evolution of the piece in clay, which took on a life of its own; the dory mate continuing to haul the catch while the storm rages; the addition of more fish to the boat, with some still alive and others fighting to return to the sea; seagulls following the boat for an easy meal; and crashing seas. Blackburn remains steadfast, doing his job of keeping the dory upright, affixing his hands to the oars, rowing for their life.

While maritime pieces are anchored in a verisimilitude of sorts, Carpenter’s sculptures depicting the “fantastical world of dreams and ancient mythology” explore the limitless capacity of imagination while awake or asleep. Ancestral folklore and Greek myths are starting points for Carpenter’s imagination and creative process to take flight.

The majesty and wonder of nature can also be discovered in his work. Birds are present in many. In Winged Messengers the Greek god Mercury flings birds into being on the earth.

Viewers can imagine Morpheus, the Bringer of Dreams visiting mortals in their sleep. “These sculptures offer the viewer entry into a world of wonder that may not be accessible or experienced by any other means. They also invite viewers to experience feeling and emotion.”

Each piece possesses some element of fear, sorrow, grief, anger, or humor. Carpenter mines experiences in his own life that hold emotional weight to help him express a particular feeling. The Griever, created during the pandemic, expresses directly the devastation that accompanies the loss of loved ones.

Cohesion involves no gods or humans; rather schools of fish making their choreographed migration through space.