New Bedford celebrated the unveiling of the city's new sculpture of Moby Dick writer Herman Melville on Friday.
CAI's Gilda Geist spoke to the sculptor, Steff Rocknak, about her artistic process and the reactions she's gotten to her work so far.
Gilda Geist You've done so much iconic sculpture work from Edgar Allan Poe in Boston to work with the Smithsonian and Saks Fifth Avenue. What was different about doing Melville?
Steff Rocknak Melville's pretty challenging. "Moby-Dick" is a challenging novel, and that's the novel that was connected most to New Bedford. His stay in New Bedford helped to frame that novel. So yeah, going back through that and figuring out how to make this sculpture site-specific, so it fits particularly not only to New Bedford, but to that spot right next to the Seamen's Bethel—that was the challenge. You know, as I went back through "Moby-Dick"—I actually listened to it again on Audible while I was working on a wood sculpture—it wasn't as hard as I thought it was going to be when I heard Chapter 9, [where] he wrote a lot about the Seaman's Bethel. But then I thought, how am I going to incorporate the whale? I can't have a giant whale there. Obviously, that's not going to work. Can I have a whale tail? No, that would look corny. That's not going to work. And then someone suggested to me, well, what about some scrimshaw? And then it occurred to me that Melville mentions temples of whale bones later on in the book, and they're awesome. So, I thought maybe I could use whale bones as an architectural element so he could be rising up out of the whale bones and that would connect him to Jonah, to go in and out of the whale.
GG Can you please explain your process a little bit when you are sculpting figures? And if your Melville sculpture at all deviated from your typical process, I'd be curious to hear about that as well.
SR I normally work in wood, so working in clay is a deviation. I do love working in clay. It's like going from a standard car to an automatic because you can make mistakes and correct them. In wood, you really have one shot. Doing public art is also a deviation from my gallery pieces that I do because I've got to fit it in a place and I have to think about the public. It's a different thing making public art. It's not all about me and all about my piece. So, that was a deviation. But actually, making the figure and the technicality of doing a face or doing a hand—that's pretty much the same. I made this small model about 19 inches in clay, and then I scaled it up to 5.5 feet just by doing measurements and figuring out what percentage would the rib be at 5.5 feet. It's kind of a complicated thing. I wrote it all over my table. I don't know if I could repeat it now if I told you, but it worked. So, I scaled them up to 5.5 feet in clay, and then they came and scanned them. The foundry was UAP—Urban Art Projects. They're down in Rock Tavern, New York. They came up and scanned it with a high-resolution scanner. And then we worked for a few months digitally, making sure that all the detail was captured from the clay. And then they enlarged it to 7 feet and cast it in [what's] called PMMA. It's plastic infused with wax. They printed it in the PMMA and then they cast it from that. The bigger you get, the more detail you lose, so that's why you want to make it as big as possible when they scan it. That's why I did not want to scan the little 19-inch model to 7 feet, which he is currently, because it really would look terrible.
GG The Boston Globe's Meredith Goldstein wrote recently about her first and perhaps most important takeaway from seeing your depiction of Melville, which is that he's hot, to use her words. I don't know if you've read any of the comments on Goldstein's article. One gem I found on Instagram comes from user @blanchedevereaux. She wrote, "Forget call me Ishmael...just call me," and then added the heart eyes emoji. Some of the comments I probably couldn't even read on the radio. What is it like for you to get this kind of reception to one of your works? Have you ever gotten this kind of reaction before?
SR No, absolutely not, because my sculptures are usually kind of funny looking. But I've always thought that Melville was handsome. Always, even as an undergraduate studying him. He was particular about his appearance and he was well-groomed, so I wanted to capture that in the sculpture. And I'm thrilled that people are reacting that way. Hopefully he would have been glad, too.
GG What other reactions have you gotten?
SR I think people like the ribs more than I thought they would. In fact, there's a lot of up angles that they're taking. You kind of lie on the ground and see him through the ribs. And I hadn't really focused on that angle before. So, that is really cool when photographers go and show me an angle that I really hadn't thought about, and I'm glad that people are picking up on that.
