Cory Fuhr on display in the Rotary Courtyard

Cory Fuhr was born in Vernon.  He is a self-taught artist (one of his prior occupations was a tree planter), and has exhibited locally over the past five years and at the Fran Willis Gallery in Victoria.  Fuhr has created commissions in private homes and companies in the Okanagan, including Far West, Predator Ridge, and Holiday Park Resort.  Tree, acquired by the Kelowna Art Gallery in 2000, is the largest of a series of welded tree sculptures done by the artist.

The tree has potent symbolic meaning for many cultures, ancient, historical and contemporary:  "all stem from the notion of the living cosmos in a state of perpetual regeneration." (Dictionary of Symbols, Penguin Publishers, 1996 edition).  Although the tree as subject has a deep history in painting, it does not appear in sculpture until the 20th century.  One of the earliest examples in Canadian art is Elizabeth Wyn Wood's 1929 cast aluminum stylized sculpture Dead Tree (Collection of the National Gallery of Canada).

Contemporary artists often refer to historical-pictorial sources, but with a renewed awareness and consciousness of environmental and ecological issues.  American artist Alan Sonfist re-planted trees and native flora in a vacant lot in downtown New York.  It was one of the earliest large-scale environmental artworks, titled Time Landscape and initiated in 1978.  Trees have been used as "found" objects and memorialized, as in the work of Canadian artists Spring Hurlbut, Reinhard Reitzenstein, Roy Arden, and Tim Whiten and in the Okanagan region by artist Jim Kalnin.  Other artists,  such as Victor Cicansky and Stacey Spiegel, have used trees in casting sculpture in bronze and aluminum.  Artists such as Michael Snow, John McKinnon and Michael Davey have created abstracted tree-sculpture assemblages.

There are, remarkably, few examples of trees modeled in steel - a material that is "unforgiving" and does not lend itself to naturalism. Cory Fuhr's interpretation is unique on many counts and his construction process is noteworthy:  building up from a skeletal framework, adding form, grinding,  sanding and applying a finishing coat of wax.  The result creates a lustrous finish and silver shimmer as light catches the trunk and branches and is reflected in different ways.  Fuhr's sculpture is without question the form of "tree" but with a quality of "otherworldliness".  The starkness of form, without leaves, suggests an end to a life cycle, but the lone trunk can also be read as a symbol of defiance against the ravages of the elements and time:  there are comparable images by Canadian painters W.P Weston,  Lawren Harris and others.  Sited in the outdoor Rotary Courtyard it also speaks of the relationship between the built environment (and cultural enterprise of the gallery), and the eternal presence of nature.

This dualism -- the sign of nature and culture --  can be compared to other works currently installed in the Gallery.  Peter von Tiesenhausen's Red Vessel (1998) (fig 1), is boat-object woven from willow branches.  Tiesenhausen does not disguise the raw natural source of the material:  it retains a "tree quality" as the bottom of the sculpture "reverts" to a root-like form, as if still growing.  In doing so he combines the symbolic meanings of the tree with that of the boat.  For many cultures, the boat represents the passage from the living world to the afterlife.

Likewise Mark Gomes' Bell (1992-3) (fig 2), is a transformation of materials.  The bell, always made from metal,  becomes a hand-woven wicker object in Gomes' sculpture.  It has a comparable symbolic meaning to the tree and boat:  the ringing of bells in many cultures is an act of exorcism or purification as part of religious ceremonies and rituals.   Gomes replaced the clapper with a survey-type tripod to hold it up, to underscore the symbolic passage between Heaven and Earth.

The three works have in common a surrealistic quality, the ordinary made extraordinary, as well as a sense of the absurd; the tree that cannot grow, the boat that cannot float, and the bell that cannot ring.

Reference Images

Installation photos

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