Artist
Statement
Mike
Shuler has been an independent studio artist since 1973.
His work has been exhibited at the Museum of Fine Arts,
Boston; the Wood Turning Center, Philadelphia; the permanent
collection of the American Craft Museum in New York City;
and the High Museum in Atlanta. Shuler's work was featured
in theWall
Street Journal in June,1991. His bowls have toured throughout
Europe.
Statement
I
have been working with tools and materials all my life.
That was how I spent my time as a boy and I feel fortunate
that I've been able to go through into adulthood with
the continuity of a kind of a playful occupation from
childhood.
I
have been working with tools and materials all my life.
That was how I spent my time as a boy and I feel fortunate
that I've been able to go through into adulthood with
the continuity of a kind of a playful occupation from
childhood.
What
I'm doing now is not really that much different from
when I was seven, I've just got some more possibilities
open to me now and my projects do come out a little
different than they did then. I started turning wood
in 1964, when I was 14. I didn't know what a lathe was
but I had some tools and I figured out that if I could
get the wood spinning I could put my pocket knife to
it and make it out. So that's what I did a lot of that
winter, making miniatures out of birch dowels. And turning
became my first love.
Mostly
self-taught and self-employed over the years, I began
this segmented work in 1985 as a beginning point of
a technique/motif that will eventually allow me the
means to give physical form to ideas that began in my
mind in 1970. This will involve large, segmented, turned
forms combined as single objects. Somehow there is an
extraordinary beauty produced by all this. The technique
provides a complex three-dimensional symmetry and the
wood gives it a fluidity or a motion of it's own. My
desire is just to present simple beauty that will feed
the human spirit.
Available
INVENTORY
