Five Questions with Professor Eric Nordgulen

Tuesday, July 14, 2020

Eric Nordgulen. Liz Kaye, Indiana University

Outside of the busy Western entrance to Eskenazi Hall is a fabricated aluminum sculpture that students, faculty, and staff walk by several times a day during the academic year — maybe without ever knowing the artist or its history.

Eric Nordgulen created the sculpture, called "Antenna Man," in 1998 as a prototype for a larger version, which was installed at Chicago's Navy Pier a year later. Nordgulen is a professor of sculpture at Herron, an Efroymson Contemporary Arts Fellow, and a recipient of numerous grants and commissions related to public art. "Antenna Man" is just one of his many installations on the IUPUI campus, at the heart of Indianapolis, and across the country.

While we could possibly create a do-it-yourself tour mapping out where to find Nordgulen's public art, instead we are featuring him for our next round of "Five Questions," a series of Q&As in which we ask various faculty members for sage advice and insight into their creative disciplines.

HERRON: You describe sculpture "as a means to explore one's relationship to their surroundings." How does this inform the way you view the world as an artist?

ERIC NORDGULEN: When a person encounters art of any kind, they experience something that is new and different. In order to try to understand art, you must compare it to things you already know and are familiar with. So, art can provide a new vantage point to consider what we know and understand about the world, and sometimes this new experience can change the way we see things we thought we understood or take for granted.

General themes in my work have at times been something to do with the human figure or the implied presence of a person; objects we use for basic survival needs, such as a lifejacket, canteen or canoe; and objects recognized as natural forms used in combination with industrial forms.

HERRON: Many of your sculptures are permanently on display in Indianapolis. In what ways does public art add meaning to our communities and the built environment?

Nordgulen's 2018 sculpture "Revival" can be seen from New York Street outside Eskenazi Hall. Courtesy of Eric Nordgulen

NORDGULEN: Artworks placed in public spaces are encountered by people as they go from one place to another. No one has to go out of their way to experience the art. Many people will see the art regularly as they pass by on their way to work, or at the park where they walk or play.

In this way, art has an opportunity to be integrated daily into people's lives. So, people live with public art and they can even share a kind of ownership of the art that exists in the places they frequent.

HERRON: How do your teaching approaches inspire or challenge Herron students to push the limits of their creations?

NORDGULEN: Students work their way through a number of concepts, materials, and processes to learn what kind of art is important to them. One student might work in the foundry to cast bronze or weld steel, another might use fabric and a sewing machine, and another might work in the woodshop. Each student is encouraged to discover ideas and interests and materials which are meaningful to them and to explore the kind of work that will allow them to pursue their own interests. In this way, each student discovers their identity as an artist and finds a personal way of working with their chosen materials.

HERRON: How important are mentorship and peer-to-peer social connections as students develop their own creative voices?

NORDGULEN: I have always believed that students and teachers come together on common ground in the classroom. The problems and questions students work with are the same problems and questions I work with for my projects at my studio. The only difference between students and teachers is time and experience. Students have great opportunities to learn from teachers and each other, and teachers can often learn from their students. And when my students graduate, I think of them as colleagues; we are all artists working together.

HERRON: What hobbies inspire or recharge your artistic practice?

NORDGULEN: Somehow, I don't think I have ever had time for a hobby, but perhaps some of my research activities could be seen as hobby activity. For instance, I have studied how to make birch-bark canoes in order to figure out how to make a sculptural lifejacket form and also some canoe forms for art.

Also, I began to study honeybees because of my interest in environmental issues. Bees are incredible builders and as you watch them work, you learn a great deal about weather patterns, daily temperature, when trees and plants come into bloom, how nectar is gathered and honeycomb is made. I made a "sculptural" structure for the beehive, placed it in a park, and I kept bees for about ten years until I finally passed the beekeeping duties along to others.

I think my next hobby will be to expand my research of solar energy systems and try to incorporate those systems into some art.

Herron School of Art + Design

Five Questions with Professor Eric Nordgulen

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Eskenazi Hall, 735 W. New York Street, Indianapolis, IN 46202