Big sticks, speaking softly

Patrick Dougherty thrives on artistic derring-do. For 21 years, this improbably modest sculptor has taken on one creative assignment after another, always in a new city and never knowing what he'll do till he gets there.

All he knows is this: Whatever he creates will be outside, made of sticks, and destined to last only two or three years before it succumbs to wind, rain, snow, and the inevitable time and decay.

Dougherty, 63 and from Chapel Hill, N.C., is in the midst of a three-week artist-in-residency at the Morris Arboretum in Chestnut Hill. There, in an idyllic green vale on the banks of the Wissahickon, he's building a huge and weirdly wonderful sculpture roughly modeled on the spiral architecture of the shell of a snail.

"I've never made anything pagodalike, with rings as it ascends, the way a snail looks," Dougherty says.

Day by day, hundreds of willow, dogwood, maple, and oak saplings thinned from an overcrowded nursery are being bored into the ground, tamed, bent, and woven into circular form without benefit of hardware or cement.

Just raw muscle, scaffolding, heavy gloves - it's punishing - and there are so many arboretum volunteers Dougherty couldn't accommodate them all.

Eight to 10 times a year, he's "in residence" somewhere - Le Jardin des Arts in Chateaubourg, France, one month, maybe Sioux City Arts Center in Iowa the next. He scopes out the site, decides what to build, and then, for several weeks or months, goes at it eight hours a day, five days a week, rain or shine.

"I have a preference for working big," Dougherty says, though, confession time, he lives in a "dinky little house."

And what about those decidedly undinky, 20-foot-tall structures he makes? He describes them as "conversations with the world about sculpture." But someday, the "talk" will stop, the sculptures will all turn to ashes, and the world will be without a single trace of Patrick Dougherty's curious and prolific portfolio.

Got a problem with that?

Dougherty, who charges $17,000 plus expenses for his gigs, shrugs. "I always thought my best shot is to work every day, do whatever's really working for me and what I feel compelled to make," he says.

And what shall we call you - twig artist? Landscape sculptor? Ephemeral, stickwork or earthwork artist?

"Yes," he replies mischievously.

Carole Loeffler, a sculptor and assistant fine arts professor at Arcadia University, considers Dougherty in the artistic tradition of Robert Smithson, who built the massive Spiral Jetty out of rocks and earth on Utah's Great Salt Lake; Richard Long, a "land artist" whose art rises from what he finds on walks and hikes; and Andy Goldsworthy, whose transient works are made of mud, stones, leaves, wood, even ice and snow.

"Patrick, for me, is about the form and using the same materials over and over," Loeffler says. "What's really nice is that sometimes large things can be foreboding or too monumental to enjoy, but his are whimsical and fun and easy to interact with."

People have gotten married in Dougherty sculptures. They like to be photographed out front. They eagerly explore the insides.

You can tell: Dougherty prefers "playing to the casual viewer." He loves the idea that schoolchildren, passersby, college kids, and gardeners can enjoy and experience what he does.

"It's not like leaving your piece in a gallery, where five people come to the opening and then nobody else comes," he says. "You get immediate pleasure from the public and from the people that help you."

Sculptor Ron Klein, who teaches fine arts at St. Joseph's University, thinks part of the appeal of naturalistic works is that "the artist uses objects from the real world and reinvents them."

Dougherty turns ordinary sticks and saplings into twisted towers and turrets, cones, castles, beehives, and cocoons with doors and windows. "As artists, that's our job - to look at ordinary things most people ignore and look deeper," says Klein, who travels regularly to Myanmar, Madagascar, and the Amazon to scour the rainforest floor for fallen seed pods to use in his art.

Believe it or not, Dougherty finds, people relate to sticks on a deep, sometimes highly emotional level.

"It's backyard material that you fought with trimming bushes. It's something you played with as a child, that you noticed in bird nests, that you read about in National Geographic," he says, "and I think there is a shadow life that we are all connected to from our hunting and gathering pasts."

Dougherty relishes the conversations his sweeping works provoke. Visitors often find themselves back in childhood.

So it was for Joan Farhat of Mount Airy, who watched the artist work one day last week. "It takes me back to when I was about 10 years old," she says. "It's like the stories your mom would read you with things - shelters - like that in there and little people living in them. It's marvelous."

At some sites, Dougherty says, people seem strangely reluctant to leave the walkway and get up close to his structures. Looking around the arboretum, he adds, "I've been assured that people here do merge with the natural world. They do cross the grass and come over."

As if on cue, Stein Feick, visiting the arboretum from Massachusetts, veers off the path and heads across the lawn toward Dougherty's woven-wood work.

"It's amazing," she says, vowing to return this summer to see how it all turns out and maybe take a peek, or a picture, inside the snail-pagoda.

Sculptor at Work

Patrick Dougherty will be working in the arboretum's Madalyn K. Butcher Sculpture Garden during its weekday hours, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., until April 18. His finished work will be named on the last day and left in place until it decays or falls down.

Morris Arboretum is located at 100 E. Northwestern Ave. Weekend hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Admission: $14; seniors $12; $7 students with ID and youths ages 3 to 17; free for children under 3. Information: 215-247-5777 or go to www.morrisarboretum.org.

For information on the artist, go to Dougherty's Web site at www.stickwork.net.