Photos by Lucie Monk
After preliminary sketching, George Ufford builds his mobiles based largely on intuition, letting the materials and his familiarity with their properties dictate the structure and choreography of each piece.
Intuition is key for mobile artist George Ufford
It was a Friday morning in late June, already punishingly muggy, when I stepped into George Ufford’s sun-splashed backyard studio. Inside, generous panes of glass extended from the floor to the vaulted ceiling, affording a panoramic view of Ufford’s verdant garden. Tinted shadows flickered and dotted the carpet below, calling the curious eye upward to find their source. The culprits: mobiles—of varied size, span, and color—catching the light and air in an unhurried sway.
To explain his work, Ufford didn’t pull out a sketchbook or wax poetic on his approach. Instead, he cut a path across the room toward me. He became a conductor. With calculated nudges, he ignited each mobile he passed into its own lively dance.
The chain reactions created by a slight breeze or push from the artist echo the ripples of influence that inform the development of any art form. The origins of Ufford’s mobiles can be located with American sculptor Alexander Calder, who is credited with first creating the kinetic sculptures in the early 1900s; in 1931, Marcel Duchamp coined the term “mobile” to describe Calder’s pioneering work. And it was a craft that Calder kept at prodigiously until his death in 1976.
Around the time of the artist’s passing, a young welder and wood carver happened to be wandering around New York. Ufford had studied at Hartwood College in Oneonta, New York—“You can just say ‘upstate,’” he chuckled—and was in the big city when he first spotted one of Calder’s mobiles hanging grandly at a gallery. “There it was, just scampering across the ceiling!” said Ufford. “Then I started to notice his work around town, and I really enjoyed it.”
To Ufford, the medium “made sense.” He went home and recreated the “scampering” piece from aluminum and welder’s rod.
Now, almost thirty years later, he’s amassed a daunting body of work. “I spend more time making them than I do keeping track of them,” said Ufford, who hangs the mobiles both in his studio and throughout his home. He compared the proliferation to a heap of grandkids. “At some point it’s just like … Hey, you there!”
And while his early creations mimicked Calder closely, Ufford has developed his own designs—his own touch, so to speak. His mobiles now hang with a loose confidence, as opposed to the tighter, smaller versions he crafted when he was younger.
The largest piece in his studio reflects the opposition of dark and light. On its lower arm, which slopes down toward the floor, a host of black disks dangles in an uneasy bobble. White disks populate the opposite arm. Linked more tightly to the overarching rod, these shapes proved difficult to disturb as Ufford shifted the mobile.
“It’s a juxtaposition of the black and the white,” he explained. “That model over there, see how that arch is continuous? Whereas when this one comes down, it’s got a kink to it. So you put the whole bend in one spot rather than the whole rod being arched.”
Each piece begins as an idea in Ufford’s mind, some more formed than others.
“You start out with a piece of paper, you know, a design—and then you see what it looks like when you get done. You don’t always know what scale it’s going to be.”
Ufford then carves the shapes he will need out of engraver’s stock, an opaque plastic which comes sheathed in protective paper, its color identified by a manufacturer’s number. Lately, he’s been using colored Plexiglas too. The translucent quality gives the mobiles a new relationship with light.
From there, his work is not so easily explicable. Ufford, in each piece he crafts, bows to his own intuition. The weight, the bend, the balance he’ll need to arrive at his desired choreography—Ufford keenly knows the materials he’s working with. The rod lengths and added weights necessary to put the “mobile” in his mobiles are calculated somewhere within his mind, but he’s reluctant to put the process into words.
“If I had to explain it to someone else, I guess I could,” he shrugged. “But I just don’t have the language for that.”
It seems, though, that language is no obstacle between Ufford and his daughter Tina, a potter, massage therapist, and yoga instructor. The younger Ufford lived for years in an apartment adjacent to her father’s house, relocating only last fall. She retains part of her pottery studio in Ufford’s backyard, mere feet from where her father works daily on his mobiles.
The two have found common ground in their work. “It’s about balance,” said Tina. “Balance and movement.”
Like his daughter, Ufford communicates in touch. “Some days I don’t even sketch [an idea] out,” he said. “I just start working.”
When he finishes a piece, or a set of mobiles returns from a gallery show (he’s been showcased up and down the East Coast), he isn’t so quick to put them on display in his home.
“You get into a rut if you have too much of your own work around. You end up doing the same thing again. Painters I know will kind of finish a piece—of course they’re never finished—but they’ll take it down off the easel, turn it around backwards, and put it up against the wall. Then when they’ve left it long enough, they’ll put it up in the closet.”
Ufford’s own shelving process involves draping the mobiles carefully on the ground or hanging them flat against the wall. The colors remain; the wire rods still glint as the sun moves across them. But they are at rest.
With his mind uncluttered by the work of the days and weeks before, Ufford dives into his next project. Sometimes with a notepad, sometimes with a dream he wants to recreate—but often, he just lets his hands do the work.
Details. Details. Details. George Ufford’s mobiles can be found at a variety of locations in the region, including: Frameworks Gallery 8501 Highland Road Baton Rouge, La. (225) 769-0582 Atomic Pop Shop 2963 Government Street Baton Rouge, La. atomicpopshop.com Birdman Café 5687 Commerce Street St. Francisville, La. (225) 635-3665 George Ufford also accepts commissions. (225) 317-2635
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