ABE McNALLY
Born in Vermont in 1975. Lives and works in Brooklyn, New York
My sculptures develop from a set of relationships: material and tool, past and present, scale of sculpture and body of viewer.
I’m drawn to materials from the rural northeast: cedar shingles, firewood, woolen cloth, boards from trees I cut with my father on his Christmas tree farm in Northern Vermont. These materials are naturally distinct and often hard for me to control. My history and personal associations with a material are critical, pulling me into an active conversation with the material and the past.
The tools I use are commonplace but often have personal stories associated with them. Growing up in Vermont I would help my father cut trees for firewood or help my mother wedge clay in her shop. When I use a chainsaw or plaster mold in my studio in Brooklyn that history is always present.
While my choice of materials and tools opens conversations between past, present, and place, the scale of my recent sculptures opens conversations between objects and viewer. These human-scale sculptures offer a personal visceral encounter, body of sculpture to body of viewer, through the past to this place now.
