Ed Haddaway Uses Sculpture To Explore Wild Dream World

BY BILL LEBZELTER

NEW MEXICO MAGAZINE

            The motif of Ed Haddaway’s studio is that of a funhouse in steel.

Spirals ascend from tables, stairs lead crookedly upward, forks jut out of sculptures at odd angles and askew chairs are not for the sitting.

            While wild and fantastic at first glance, there’s also an uncertain and darker edge to Haddaway’s work on closer inspection.

            Haddaway has assembled these and other pieces including From a Series of Recurring Dreams in a show titled Ed Haddaway -- Recent Works at Shidoni Contemporary Gallery.

The show opens today at the Tesuque Gallery beginning with a reception for the artist from 5 to 8 pm.

            The Albuquerque sculptor credits much of his artistic inspiration to dreams, said his work stems from nightmares he experienced as a child.

            “I pay a lot of attention to the spaces I’m in in my dreams,” he said. “I’m aware of stairways and doors and rooms, so its not necessarily a door that goes nowhere, but a door that leads to something I’m not sure of.”

            In one of the sculptures, a twisty pink stairway leads past a curvy white tree to a door with nothing behind it but air.

            While Haddaway draws on child-like perceptions, and his work is often described as whimsical, the artist does not romanticize youth as an exalted state.

            “I don’t really have an idyllic view of childhood,” he said. “It’s just that it’s extremely intense.”

            The darker hue under the playhouse brightness comes through in a variety of forms. A dog speckled with bright red-painted dots has a has a set of razor-sharp choppers. A figure with a half-troll, half-clown, aspect has his insides swirled uncomfortably and wears a sinister expression.

            The artist’s shift away from bright colors painted all over the works and toward shoddier coats also detracts from the whimsy on the surface.

            More of the steel in his newer pieces shows through and much of the material has a deliberate roughness.

            “It looks like it’s simply weathered, but you have to work it a lot to get to that point,” he said. While the sculptor said he likes working with steel and appreciated the flexibility the form offers over his early wood, he makes no claims for his abilities as a craftsman.

            “My work is not about technique,” he said. “It’s probably the opposite.”

            In contrast to other steel sculptors who send up the industrial state with industrial

sculptures, Haddaway is not ashamed of his less technical path to artistic prominence.

            “How can you compete with the car manufacturers?” he asked “You get into that sort of competition and you never really win.”

            Haddaway’s works are roughly crafted, making no apologies for exposed weld marks. Crude ladders, doors and windows often are attached to the main body.

            The inspiration for these appendages is his subconscious mind. Haddaway said, noting the symbolic value of windows and doors as entries to the soul.

            “I see (my artwork) basically as therapy,” he said. “I really believe in Carl Jung’s idea of the collective unconscious. So I think what I am doing is delving into my subconscious and coming up with some images of some power. 

            “It’s about connecting with other people on a certain level.

            “I’ve learned to retain my dreams very well, and I can usually pull them out. I’ve some I can remember from years and years ago, in a rack of a store” he said, adding that he is not logging dreams in a journal at this time.

            And his involvement in a form in which artists seldom find their supplies on the rack of a store has never given him pause.

            “Just putting together things has been so natural to me that I don’t question it,” he said. “It does get a little old hauling things around and picking them up...but I don’t know. I can’t see myself not doing it.”

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