Meet Your Neighbor: Robert Harrison (Dec 2014)

Saturday, November 15 was a chilly night for an outdoor party but nobody had a problem staying warm at Robert Harrison’s event. Given seven sources of steady fire, some occasionally accelerating dramatically (plus two flamethrowers), nobody could dispute the idea that this party was a flaming success.

Though fairly new to the visual arts, Robert is not hiding his light under a bushel. He’s a fire artist—he builds sculptures which exude flames. This is the point he currently occupies on a linear progression—a journey through several phases accessed by passing a series of opening doors.

So, a couple of doors back, here’s what happened. He was at a welding shop, waiting for some work to be done on his van, playing around with some cast-off metal bits and thinking about how they might be arranged to form a table base for a glass table top he had. Could the shop weld some- thing like this for him? Yep—and they did. After bringing a few more assem- blages to them, Robert decided he’d rather learn to weld than continue bumping up against the frustration (and expense) of using somebody else’s hands to create what he saw in his mind’s eye.

When Robert bought his first welder (around 2007) and commenced to weld up his own set of chairs to go with his glass top dining room table, he’d become a designer/craftsman making other chairs, candlesticks and lamps—all functional items assembled from found parts. In a blacksmithing class he later learned to alter metal bending and shaping it expanded his capabilities. Later, when he decided to leave off the candle-holding part of an assemblage, he completed a transition from craftsperson to artist— if a thing had no function it was sculpture, if he made sculptures, he was an artist.

His first sculpture to incorporate flames took the form of a stringed instrument. It was inspired by a comment about a friend learning to play a banjo, “the only good banjo is a flaming banjo.” Robert welded up a fairly convincing facsimile of the round-bodied instru- ment, incorporated a half dozen gas nozzles connected by hoses to an propane tank, then lit it—”Flamjo.” Next came “Global Warming,” an earth-like sphere rotating due to the heat rising from its central flame.

Displaying these in his own yard and loaning them for display at friends’ parties, Robert enjoyed the way people responded. He saw viewers drawn to them as humans are drawn naturally to fire. These are more like living things than static sculptures are, and they provide the warmth which we all need.

He made a self portrait, a seated figure with a drink in one hand and a guitar in the other (Robert was previously a musician). That piece spent a month on view in the Atlanta Botanical Garden’s scarecrow show (sans flames, for liability reasons).

Reinserting functional elements while maintaining a strongly sculptural form, Robert built the “Seuss Machine,” a fully functional grill, pizza oven and smoker which, according to a friend, “looks like something Dr. Seuss would have in his back yard.” This one is wood fired, rather than gas.

Robert enjoys making both light- hearted and meaningful pieces. Among the former, whose titles often involve word play, is a recent audience par- ticipation piece called “Fire in the Corn Hole,” pictured at bottom left. It’s very much like the common game of tossing a bean bag through a hole. In Robert’s version, though, when a player successfully targets a fire- proof “bean bag,” the modest flame atop a stand pipe explodes like a flamethrower and fire shoots out of the “hole.” Among the more meaningful pieces, “Burnt Offering,” which incorporates both fire and water, speaks to the beauty of a sincerely given and/or received gift. His most recent piece, and the largest to date, is nine feet tall and eight feet wide. “Singing Serpent” takes the form of a fire breath- ing snake rising above a peace sign and coiling around flowers. Is the beast pro- tecting these symbols or smashing and burning them? Robert leaves it to the viewer to choose one of those narra- tives, devise a third story, or do entirely without.

He doesn’t require a viewer to find any more meaning in the snake than in the bean bag game. While some of his sculptures hold deep meaning for him, he offers them to viewers without expectations.
Beside displaying them in his Williams Park back yard, Robert trans- ports his work for exhibition at fire friendly festivals from Georgia to as far away as Nevada. He shares them—he has loaned them, rented them, even set one up for a movie shoot—but he does- n’t sell them. “They’re too personal,” he says, “They’re part of me.”

You can see more at Flamewerx.com.

December 2014 Memo can be viewed in it’s original form here