Exploring Inside Territories

BY ROBERT NOTT

THE NEW MEXICAN

             Ed Haddaway’s sculptures are dream catchers.

It’s kind of funny when you think about the fact that the only reason he started making sculptures was that he didn’t want his mom hanging his art on the refrigerator. Drawings and paintings, she could hang, but sculptures were another thing altogether

            Haddaway’s brightly colored steel sculptures would be right at home in a book by Dr. Seuss. On the surface they exude an air of whimsicality (a label he dislikes although he acknowledges it fits) in their depiction of figures, objects and settings.

            Underneath there’s a hint of dark humor (a guy has a pet alligator in one, for instance, and the guy looks happy but he doesn’t have any hands, making you wonder what the rascally alligator has been eating for lunch) as well as suggestion of nightmare visions come to artistic life.

“I’m an introvert at heart” Haddaway said in an interview in his indoor/ outdoor studio in Albuquerque. “I spend an awful lot of time looking inside myself and dealing with dream images that float around me,

         “The only place for me to start is within. I work from the inside. I’m not didactic. I’m just putting a part of myself out there for people to react to.”

     How you’ll react is an open-ended question.  What should you make of a dolphin in the tree who is talking to what seems to be a dog-man? Or the sculptural figure who holds a plate of snakes in his hands? Or the sword-swallowing circus member who has a dog/wolf nipping at his free hand?

      You would think his sculpture the Happy Coincidence of Life would explain it all for you, but you may as well ask the artist, for a “how to navigate through the pieces on a spiritual, artistic, psychological and simply enjoyable level” guide. The piece is like an out-of-sync tree that is growing chairs--- and one precipitously placed chair in particular would fit into a tightrope-balancing act.

Circus analogies may be the appropriate when contemplating Haddaway’s art. While they suggest technically well-polished examples of conceptual art where the process is more important than the product, seen from another angle, they’d be ideal decorative pieces for your front lawn, or maybe your 3-year old’s playroom.

At times the work suggests that of a really talented artistic child whose imagination knows no bounds. Tat comparison suits Haddaway fine.

 “I’m trying to recapture my youth,” he said, “and failing miserably.”

    That desire to keep hold not of his dreams but of his childhood explain why Haddaway surrounds himself with antique toys including a monkey with cymbals, a Wurlitzer Jukebox and period motorcycles ranging from the mid 1920s to the  mid 1960s

     Building things-----be it an artistic connection to his fellow man or a bridge to dreamland-----has intrigued Haddaway since he was a child. The Texas native began creating at about age 5.

The idea of developing that talent into a career into a career in cabinetry or architecture didn’t grab him however. In  any event he would probably end up making a house where the doors led to nowhere, and the chairs are mounted halfway up the kitchen walls.

     Were his parents supportive of his desire to be an artist? After all it was the 1950s and his father was an investment broker.

        “There was a lot of benign neglect. “Haddaway replied with a slight smile. “I got all of the messages about how hard it would be to make a living. My father liked the idea of me doing something practical and being an artist on the side. I never wanted to do that.”

     “They were supportive but the underlying question was always ‘Can you survive doing this? That’s still a good question by the way.”

Haddaway moved to Albuquerque in 1969 to study art at the University of New Mexico. While he is grateful for the exposure he received there to many different art forms and theories, he also rebelled against the University system, much the same as he rebelled against his mother when she wanted more drawings to put on the fridge.

      He returned to Texas to undertake a graduate degree at North Texas State in Denton (now the University of North Texas) but he dropped out after realizing he did not fit in.

    “I got together whatever money I had and started buying tools to create.” He recalled. He worked with found objects whenever he could. Infusing his work with a Dadaists sense of surrealistic experimentation.

He’s been working in sculpture for nearly 30 years, moving in a circle , as he explained it, in terms of genre, approach, and materials.

         Even now he continues to weld steel sculptural pieces together, he’s branching out somewhat by building Styrofoam and copper pieces that have a n organic amorphous feel to them.

           While he starts every piece with a drawing (he called it primitive doodling) he’s open to the idea of going with the flow once he starts working with the material.

      “It’s fluid,” he said, “it’s not about control. I start with a self-push in a certain direction, but a lot of it is dictated by how I relate to the material.”

    In that sense Haddaway is like a driver who’s navigating without a road map. This notion fits in with the desire to avoid the slick machinations of this increasingly advanced technological world.

         “It’s sort of an acceptance of my own humanity,” he said of his art.“so much stuff in the world is slick and tight and machine made. During my days at the university I was always rebelling against that rigid way of looking at the world.

“There is an inn ate earthiness to my work. Maybe it’s an innate sloppiness. It’s too easy to see information  on the internet or in technology. I have to go inside myself. That’s the only territory that’s left to explore that make sense to me.

Haddaway says he is a fairly active dreamer, and in an effort to hold on to those nocturnal visions, he turns them into art.

He realizes that he is not the only artist to meld dreams with creativity. Frida Kahlo, Max Ernst, Salvador Dali, Arturo Rivera, and Olga Bulgakova, among others, have all used art to revisit and interpret dreams.

      His work is reassuring and even hopeful, including the one where the gator chewed off his master’s hands. After all if the human is willing to hang around his scaly sidekick, they must have some bond of trust between them, right?

    Haddaway said he realizes he may not be able to guide viewers through his work. But he understands that a writer not only has to have a book for people to read but also a talent for conveying emotions through the book’s words. Perhaps Haddaway’s steel sculptures serve as individual chapters in a never -ending book of dreams---- dreams that exude a childlike hope that everything in this crazy world. Including the alligators can somehow get along.