WELDER NURTURES NATURE ONE PAINSTAKING FEATHER AT A TIME
BY LAURA RASKIN

INDEPENDENT ARTS WRITER


Mary Taylor likes the dark.

Mary Taylor creates life-like and life-sized steel animals, a calling she attributes to ornithologist and natureloving parents. Her sculptures are being shown at European Traditions Antiques on Straight Wharf. ROB BENCHLEY/The Independent

It is dark and private behind a welder’s mask. From that Darth Vader-like scrim, in the quiet or sometimes radio-filled solitude of her studio, she is all focus and concentration — if for no other reason than because the dangerous medium demands it.

Taylor is a slender woman, with a sunned complexion, a bright face and a short silver haircut. On the Friday afternoon of her opening at European Traditions, she wore a blue-and-white checked button down shirt crisply tucked into shorts and white Converse All-Stars. If there is a welder “type,” her appearance said “watercolors.” It did not tell the story of a woman who spends hours wielding an oxygen and acetylene torch and melting solid steel into life-like animals, one strand of fur or feather at a time.

Mary Taylor's "She-Wolf" is meant to protect, not frighten. It has been blessed by “Grandma Twylah” of the Seneca Wolf Clan in upstate New York. The she-wolf is dedicated to Taylor's father who was her protector.

But that is what she has been doing for the last 35 years, ever since a friend taught her to use the torch.

“Steel fascinated me, because it is something so hard that we normally think of as automobiles, bridges. You can heat it up and it will bend. The tiniest tack weld will hold an enormous amount of weight. That fascinated me too, “ said Taylor, a Rochester, N.Y.-based artist.

Taylor describes her animals — birds, giraffe, deer, viper, a bald eagle with a wingspan of nine-and-a-half feet — as the result of a compulsion driven by the legacy of ornithologist parents and her idol, the pioneer naturalist John James Audubon, who painted the birds of North America.

Audubon camped the untrampled American wilderness in the mid-1800s, sometimes shooting bird specimens and inserting wires to make them easier models to draw for his seminal “Birds of America.”

Taylor does not point out the similarity to her work, but it is there. For most of her sculptures, she creates a steel rod armature, or a cage that mimics the animal she is creating. She then fills in the cage with a patchwork of sometimes thousands of pieces of hair or feathers, each a steel rod in and of itself. The fur on her “She-Wolf” bristles over the backbone and lays flat on its narrow rump.

“I feel like I’m carrying on my parents’ passion – it’s natural, not forced,” said Taylor in an interview on the patio behind the gallery and antique store. “As a kid I thought birding was pretty boring. It just got into my system. It’s just wanting to look at animals and birds.” Her parents, Joe and Helen Taylor, traveled the world birding after Joe retired from Bausch & Lomb.

A deer, “Artemis,” is dedicated to Helen. The she-wolf is dedicated to Joe, in a belated way.

It is life-size, all blue-black sheen, caught mid-stride and low with ferocity.

“At the time I was wanting to do something of the canine family. I decided on a wolf because I thought it would be the most challenging,” said Taylor.

She was not thinking of her father when she made it. It sold to a Rochester family for whom it reminded them very much of their father, who had died just days after their mother.

“We grew up with howling,” said Karen Trueheart, the daughter of Mark and Marcia Ellingson, and the buyer of the she-wolf, along with her siblings. “(Mark) was from the west where wolves ran wild. We would have these great howling sessions.” Both of her parents had a love for the natural world, but her father grew up in untouched Idaho where wolves were part of his everyday life.

Trueheart was unable to pick up the wolf right away and it stood in Taylor’s studio for several weeks. When Trueheart called to say she would be by to pick it up, Taylor remembers hanging up the phone and sobbing. She went and put her arms around the wolf’s neck. Suddenly, the wolf represented her father and how he protected her. The memory still makes Taylor’s eyes cloudy with tears.

Sometime after buying the wolf, Trueheart became aware that the Wolf Clan of the Seneca tribe was based at a reservation in upstate New York. She took the wolf there to be blessed and Grandmother Twylah Hurd Nitsch, a clan elder, asked that the wolf stay with her for a while. She wanted to see if it would invoke visions, Trueheart recalled.

It did. “Grandma Twylah” wrote up her stories, which now travel with the wolf. Trueheart also recalls the wolf’s impact on children with learning disabilities – how they saw the wolf at museums it has traveled to and did not want to leave its side; how Trueheart’s and others’ dogs have skidded to a halt before it.

“It’s indicative of how well Mary is able to evoke the spirit of the animal. It’s a profoundly moving and evocative sculpture,” said Trueheart. “Mary’s got a gift. She’s just connected.”

Now the wolf is for sale again.

“We just all decided it was time to see if there was someone else who would like to hear her energy and spirit,” said Trueheart, and so the wolf confronts visitors to European Traditions when they walk in the door.

Taylor works on one animal at a time and her preparation involves a careful study of its proportions and gestures.

“I study the animal in a very detailed way and then the texture takes on an expression of its own,” she said. “It’s all very intuitive. I do pieces that feel right and fit where I’m at.”

She is in her studio every day, most of the time welding what feels like infinitely repetitive designs, waiting for the steel to get red hot and breaking off each rod – some as small as .045 inches in diameter.

She rarely experiences the insanity that could follow such repetition.

Only once did that happen, when she was welding a 10-by-10-foot whooping crane. The feathers that covered its chest and legs were one-inch long.

“It took months just to cover. I thought, ‘Mary, what are you doing?’” she said.

But then one day there was a whooping crane, all wings and neck, and it was worth it.

Among other locations, Taylor has a California condor at the entrance to the San Bernardino County Museum, Canada geese in flight at the Bausch & Lomb headquarters in Rochester, and a golden eagle in flight at Hawk Mountain Sanctuary in Kempton, Pa.

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