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Arts and Humanities

Stick-y sculpture

Sculptor Patrick Dougherty is world renown for his ability to create incredible scultupres using sticks. His most recent creation is on display at the North Carolina Botanical Gardens.

Why sticks?

Patrick Dougherty, artist-in-residence at the North Carolina Botanical Garden and world-renowned for his stick-based sculptures, gets asked that a lot.

“There’s an inherent interest in sticks,’’ he said. “It was our first building material, children know everything about it.”

Volunteers ranging from Carolina students to community members showed up in droves beginning in early October to assist the artist by using thousands of sticks to create his latest sculpture. Dougherty spends roughly three weeks on each piece he creates.

He estimates he has completed 250 stick sculptures in his lifetime, ranging from towering house-like structures to complex designs that envelop buildings.

“I’ve got a method to my madness,” said Dougherty. “I lay the piece out using cords so I can see the footprint. I drill and set what look like small trees into the ground, then set up scaffolding around those trees and then pull the shape that I want. Once I have gotten the thing stabilized, I can cut all the string off the piece and I can put an aesthetic on it. It’s a little bit like making a canvas and drawing on it.”

The hardest part of the sculpture process was gathering materials, said Douglas Tildan, a resident of Chapel Hill who volunteered. For about a week, a group harvested trailer loads of materials from Duke Forest.

Dougherty said he drew inspiration from knot gardens in the Middle Ages. He also was inspired by Irish monks, who were known for drawing intertwining vines (which can be found in the sculpture) in their manuscripts. Dougherty said he wanted to combine naturalistic influences with manmade design.

The finished structure will remain on display until 2016.