The anvil must be somewhere in the centre,
—from “The Forge” by Seamus Heaney
Horned as a unicorn, at one end and square,
Set there immoveable: an altar
Where he expends himself in shape and music.
In 1941, the electric power authorities in the Village of Mount Horeb saw fit to erect a solid, squat, glazed brick and glass block building, The Municipal Electric Building, to facilitate the expansion of the utility to the growing community’s citizens.
At nearly the same moment, thousands of miles across the Atlantic, a Spanish expatriate living in Paris glanced in passing at a pile of junk and debris, the refuse of a churning industrial age. Within the scattered castoffs, Pablo Picasso noticed the remnants of a deconstructed, disposed-of bicycle. Selecting the seat and handlebars, he welded them together in an abstract approximation of a bovine skull with accompanying horns. Entitled Bull’s Head, through this work, springing from the memory of a ritual embedded in Spanish culture, the brutal conflict between man and beast, Picasso essentially invented a new field of sculpture: one that resulted from the combination of disparate found forms taking on a new existence as the embodied expression of artistic imagination.
That coincidence eventuated in the founding of Center Ground Studios at the Lincoln Street location of that utility property. It’s here that John Pahlas shares a studio space with his wife, ceramicist Heidi Clayton. While Heidi works in the plastic medium of wet clay, John is forging; bending; breaking; cutting; grinding; and, most importantly, welding heroically scaled sculptures that are predominantly constructed of found metal much in the same sense of playful discovery that motivated Picasso eight decades earlier.
John descends from a family embedded in the metalworking industries and arts over generations on both his mother’s and father’s side. The Armstrong Blum Company, founded in 1904 as a tool and die manufacturer that since has been subsumed into the Marvel Manufacturing Company, makers of the Marvel Draw Cut power hacksaw for metalworking, was originally part of his family legacy. John’s mother and father continue to work at Metalworks in Ripon fabricating custom wrought iron railings, furnishings, and sculptures. As a consequence, he was inculcated into the lore and practice of artistic metal manufacturing at an early age, where he learned craftsmanship; planning; a respect for his materials; and, most importantly, the discipline that enables him to sustain his efforts to create the labor intensive and physically demanding art he produces.
In a visit to photographer George Brassai in 1943, Picasso remarked on his sculpture Bull’s Head, “If you were only to see the bull’s head and not the bicycle seat and handlebars that form it, the sculpture would lose some of its impact.” In like fashion, it’s immediately apparent, regardless of the final forms John’s sculptures take, that he has retained the integrity of the source materials with respect to their originally intended functions. A wrench remains a wrench, a gear a gear, a tractor seat a seat, and a drive chain is still a chain. But in the alchemy of his art, these materials take on a new purpose as the form, structure, and texture of his subjects, whether it be a soaring eagle; a fishing heron; a wild dog; or, in the case of a major commission he completed for Duluth Trading Company, a huge angry beaver.
John attended the University of Wisconsin‒Stevens Point and finished his BFA degree at the University of Wisconsin‒Oshkosh, initially favoring his experiential learning over the demands of formal education. But once there, he acquired a solid grounding in art historical precedent while developing studio discipline and sculptural mastery. And, of course, he met Heidi.
Careful to point out that he was a working artist before attending college, John grew up with a sense of the materials and the involvement of working with his father in the shop learning blacksmithing. He started welding at the age of 12, a knowledge that certainly gave him an advantage over his collegiate peers in terms of his fabrication skills, but his art is not simply an accretion of elements or mimicry of animal or human forms. John is keen on insisting that his work has a deeper purpose and social intent.
“History does show us, however, that art plays a foundational role in providing a universal language that digs into parts of our brains that spark up the flames of attention, gets people thinking outside the foggy fatigue box, and brings about resolutions to conflicts great and small,” says John. “Through the acts of making art, investing in art, and celebrating art, we are providing safe areas in our communities that can ignite the creative energy in those that need it most so they can bring clarity and resolve to the wars going on in their heads and homes.”
Inspired by the book The Forge and the Crucible, which describes the development of metalworking from the earliest times of the human adventure with a focus on the cultural passage of knowledge and skills rather than formal learning, John sees the making of art as an almost shamanistic practice in which he serves as a go-between for viewers’ casual appreciation of their natural world and his insight and expression that enables them to deepen their daily visual awareness. The rigid heavy steel transforms; it metamorphoses into flight and power and primal animation.
The underlying structure to much of John’s work is based on an armature composed of rods and plates of mild steel. Onto this armature, he adds the textural materials drawn from piles of discarded tools; machine parts; signage; and heated, crushed, and abraded steel tubing. Suddenly, knives become feathers, bolts become fur, washers transform into scales, and the detritus of our material culture takes on new life as art that celebrates nature and engages with the environment and the viewer. As John describes his work, “It has to be exhausting, and I need instantaneous results.”
