Buonaiuto finds art in laughs, hugs, dancing
Fran Alexander is a Fayetteville resident with a longstanding interest in the environment and an opinion on almost anything else. Email her at fran@deane-alexander.com.
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Shelley Buonaiuto’s hands are drawn to clay as if a magnetic force is demanding she touch and form earth into moods and beauty and anxiety and tension. Her figures are of real people, or of people in her mind, who come out of her hands to be born. Most look happy to be here.
She says that from the early days of presenting her artwork, people liked and bought sculpted happiness more often than forms of more pensive, serious human moments. But what stays with me are her pieces that stretch their meanings across multiple possibilities. Reaction to fine art, like fine literature, is always personal, so what I say here is my own response to her work. Her creations can be seen at https://alittlecompany.net.
Two pieces, “Flight” and “Marriage,” are separate examples of universal and timeless human experiences.
“Flight” evokes today’s world of desperate displaced humanity, not knowing which way to turn, only to run — run for life. It also brings to mind yesterday: Human survival through war, famine, genocide, storms, fires, bullets, hate, rape and enslavement is a history of running from dying.
In this particular work, bindings symbolic of fabric holding a family together seem to also be entangling them in confusion and restraint. Or, the ties that bind the three figures might be telling a different story, one of a relationship torn apart, one from the other, to save their child or themselves.
“Marriage” was a private commission from a couple who wanted a sculpture expressing the creation, I assume, of each partner’s influence upon the other. The three dimensions inherent in sculpture make it possible for the viewer to see the levels of the figures from all directions, possibly even sensing in them an emotional fourth dimension. Certainly there are many sides to marriage that are chiseled over time to create one main relationship out of the many divergent possibilities two people bring to an effort of mutual tolerance and/or love.
If a picture is worth a thousands words, a sculpture’s dimensions bring three times the experience to those of us who favor shapes and structures over other art forms. Great skill must be employed to bring clay, resin, bronze or stone to life, and the finished work has to say what it’s meant to say at a viewer’s first glance in order to set its hook.
Many of this sculptor’s characters bend over laughing, stretching, talking, listening, dancing and hugging, and it’s easy to recognize them. They emerge from somewhere in our own lives as neighbors, lovers, parents. grandparents, children or friends. They are skinny, bald, pretty, flabby, elegant and handsome, truly every man and every woman.
Shelley is attuned to relationships in everything, which is probably why we met some 16 years ago. Attending environmental meetings about what a green economy could be, and later joining others in the carbon reduction efforts of the Citizens Climate Lobby, we realized we shared common interests. It took me several years, however, to learn about her art, since she’s not one to toot her own horn. When I saw what she continues to accomplish, I was awestruck, and it is extra neat when such talent is found here in Northwest Arkansas.
Sculpting women of peace versus men of war (the subjects of much bronze statuary) drives her to emphasize the feminine attributes of love, emotion, connections and motherhood, and how they all are related socially, spiritually, and physically.
It is amazing that she didn’t take a course in sculpture for 30 years, instead figuring out the craft by learning as she went. One hard lesson recently occurred when clay and weather seemed to conspire to collapse a combined piece of two women, leaving behind only their heads. She took in stride what I would have given up on, saying, almost with a shrug, that she’d change it, make it again and make it better. That forward effort defines her character because she has long been active in social, economic and environmental issues, all which require picking yourself back up and going on.
So almost immediately, Shelley set about resculpting what was broken. With clay in her hands, she knows she can see results far easier and sooner than trying to repair the world’s woes. With her art she shows us how we affect each other, and she creates it with the most basic resource we have, the earth itself.