Melba Northum

Artist’s Statement

When working in my studio I am aware of fluidity--a rapid transfer, between intrinsic insight and intellectual action. My interpretation of the creative process exemplifies this consilience between learning and intuition. I do not advocate technique at the expense of expression, nor emotion without skillful execution. Creativity is a charged experience requiring a flux and flow of the whole self. Imagine a coin that is placed on edge and flicked to spin upright, the heads and tails blur completely. The two different sides are there, but the whirling planes merge into something entirely new…a momentary sphere as it happens, or, in my case, a sculpture. This dinergy, or pattern-forming process of the union of opposites, keeps me ever eager to create.

My work is often concise in form, even “quiet,” describing subtleties of content and personal expression. Words and phrases themselves may lead to ideas for a single piece or a new series of works. I sometimes make individual elements without a finished sculpture in mind and allow these essentials to suggest a complete work. This approach requires me, and the viewer, to make connections between objects and imagery that are more felt--metaphysically speaking, and less concrete.

In general, my artworks are visual poems where objects and images form constellations of ideas much like word-based poems in which the best words are arranged in the best order in the shortest amount of space and are yet expansive in thought. I am also captivated by haiku poems—whose brevity combines form, content, and language in a meaningful compact structure—and the enigmatic Japanese koan, of similar crispness, in which understanding is abstruse through reason but accessible to intuition.

Ultimately I am guided by the poet Wallace Steven’s famous dictum, “the poem [art] should resist the intelligence almost successfully.”

Reading Sieve Hare Trigger Thus Sings the Oriole, detail