We were lucky to catch up with Jon Barlow HUDSON recently and have shared our conversation below.

Jon Barlow, appreciate you joining us today. What’s been the most meaningful project you’ve worked on?

While each sculpture project/commission is an adventure in itself, a very significant such was being commissioned by World Expo 1988 in Brisbane, Australia, to create two very large-scale sculptures in stainless steel for Expo. I built them with Commercial Metal Fabricators in Dayton, OH, then shipped them over. At the appropriate time I flew over to finish MORNING STAR II on site. I was on Expo site for five weeks doing this work, observing the building of the whole Expo site and meeting a wide variety of interesting people. Once I was done with my project, I traveled around different areas in the eastern half of Australia.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

My sculpture is my attempt to give form to the concept of unity. As a child I lived all around the world, due to my father being a groundwater geologist with the United Nations and other firms. Living in different countries meant direct experience of stone constructions like Baalbek, Petra, the Colosseum, Machu Pichu, Stonehenge. I recall thinking about the people who carved these installations and wanting to make things that would, like them, speak with people down through time.
I did indeed become a sculptor, and these experiences led me to study stone and bronze sculpture in Italy via the Lusk Memorial Fellowship with the Institute of International Education. This experience enabled me to focus on creating large-scale public sculptures around the world that create powerful, unique environments by their presence.
These multi-cultural experiences led me to understand very early in my life the unity of all peoples around the world. This led me to study art history, anthropology, philosophy, religion and natural principles, including the art aesthetics of Japan. I experienced the sublime grandeur of nature in the Saudi and Jordanian deserts, in the Andes of Ecuador and Peru; and in the Altiplano in Bolivia. I learned Yang style Tai Chi Chuan while attending the California Institute of the Arts. Initially my sculpture was what I call linear in character, and it then evolved to being centered in one way or another: to be more “wholistic” in concept and form, with balance and symmetry being an important aspect, like in the EIDOLON series. Also, Tai Chi inspired me to include in my sculpture aspects of flow and movement like the vortex, seen in the TREE OF KNOWLEDGE and DOUBLE HELIX. Studies of nature led to working with natural proportions like the Fibonacci numerical series, as used in TS’UNG MUSIC, and natural structure like the tetrahedron, seen in SHIVA:SHIWANA, among others. I even created my own 11- sided polyhedron .

What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?

A rewarding part of being an artist is one’s relationship with the world and Nature. A widely seen example of this would be Van Gogh and how he responded to his environment in so many different ways. It is a way of being in a heightened relationship with Nature. (there are of course other ways and occupations that would facilitate this as well!) This leads the artist to be like Nature in the creative process of making an art work. To take aspects of Nature and to create something new or that is an expression of one’s experience of life and Nature. Given my personal experience as a youth living all around the world in such different environments, I feel this set the tone such that I need to be in a natural environment–I can’t live in a city like NYC for example. After two years in LA attending California Institute of the Arts, I had to go work in a gold mine outside of Paradise for two years, as another example. My studio looks onto a land-trust protected pasture.
Another rewarding aspect is the opportunity to create works of sculptural art in public places all around the country, and in 26 countries around the world. This in turn enables me to meet and work with many other creative people I would not otherwise come in contact with, and to travel to many different places and countries. A further aspect is being able to “work for oneself” so to speak, to make the creative decisions on the project and for one’s self.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

While this holds for almost every commission, it was particularly significant for the World Expo 1988 commissions for the two sculptures. I had sent them my portfolio some time ago and waited months, but no word. So in 1987, I found a telephone number for Expo office in Brisbane, Australia and called and talked with Creative Director John Truscott. He asked if I could build MORNING STAR about 15 feet diameter–sure, no problem! Could I build PARADIGM 50 to 100 ft. high? sure, no problem! (Had I ever done something on this scale? a 43,000 pound sculpture 100 feet high? No.) He wired me over one hundred thousand dollars before we had even signed an agreement! I built PARADIGM in about five months, horizontally, shipped it over in seven sections and it was assembled on site as straight as an arrow! For MORNING STAR II, I had to travel to Expo and finish it on site in five weeks, as it was also too large to ship as a fully assembled sculpture.
The idea being that, when presented with a daunting challenge, one simply takes the reins in one’s teeth and proceeds!

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.hudsonsculpture.art
• Other: https://artparks.co.uk/artist-area/my-sculptures/
  https://sculptors.org.uk/artists/jon-barlow-hudson

Image Credits

portrait – Bill Frantz, Dayton, oh.
all others Jon B. Hudson