Eiffel Tower

Donald Gerola’s Eiffel Tower, commissioned for the Pawtucket Arts Festival and purchased by the festival’s Executive Committee, stands permanently outside of the Slater Park Office. Though its form and name would suggest that the famous tower inspired Gerola, he claims to study only forms found in nature. To do otherwise, he says, is to regurgitate the flawed systems of humans. The title Eiffel Tower came only after the suggestion of a young girl who had seen the sculpture before its installation.

Pure, unpainted steel, the sculpture has been allowed to rust naturally to a deep red. Its nearly psychedelic yet understated structure is typical of Gerola’s sculpture, with organic, rounded elements and hard-edged geometry conjoining to create tension and movement.

The son of an engineer and a pianist, Gerola has a fascination with both beauty and mechanics. After studying physics at the University of Dayton in Ohio, the aspiring Renaissance man became fascinated with the creation of supergraphics, a method of expanding and altering the perception of a place using colorful geometric or typographic designs. Eventually, Gerola moved to altering space as it exists in reality, and not just perception, and he began exploring sculpture.

Today, Gerola’s work ranges from small-scale to the truly monumental. As an added engineering challenge and to explore the dynamic potential of steel, Gerola also creates kinetic sculptures, one of which temporarily became a woven part of his Weaving installation. Generally working in steel, he lauds the material for its dualism, encapsulated by its heavy weight and its ability to appear weightless, which his kinetic work exemplifies even further. But also inherent in the material is a sturdy connection to its primal and permanent source. “Steel comes from the earth,” Gerola explains. “It roots my sculptures to their origin, the natural world, and so I will often leave the base of my sculptures unpainted to keep that rootedness plainly visible.” 

Gerola’s work has exhibited as part of the Art Expo in New York, on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, and throughout Rhode Island. Images have been printed in numerous publications, and his Delineated Static Sculpture was on loan to the Springfield Museum from April 2008 to May 2010. He maintains a fascinating studio in Lorraine Mills that is open to the public.

Todd Stong

Sources:

http://www.donaldgerola.com/
Correspondence with the artist

Weaving

Inspired by large-scale landscape artists Christo and Jean Claude, who famously wrapped entire vistas in orange clothe, artist Donald Gerola set out in 2012 to be the first artist ever to “weave” a river. Though Weaving in its entirety has since come down, still standing from the ambitious six-month installation is a painted steel sculpture meant to mimic a heddle (the part of the loom through which thread passes). Fortunately, extensive documentation allows us a glimpse of what was. With the aid of two professional archers, Gerola shot cables across the Blackstone River and, alone, later stretched, wove, and fastened the cords to various trees and structures on either side of the river, making precise measurements in order to create near-perfect arithmetical patterning. The labor had its kinks, as install took a physical toll on Gerola and some cords snapped, falling into the river. Despite complications, the end result was a mesmerizing display of geometry and color spanning the waters just outside of the historic Slater Mill. At night, the installation glowed as spotlights shone on the reflective filaments of the cable fibers.

Not surprisingly, Gerola sees public art as “a partnership between imagination and reality as a gift to adorn cities and landscapes that include nature and historical legacy.” Simultaneously weaving together river and land, man and nature, and modern day innovation with Pawtucket’s river-powered, industrial past as a booming textiles producer, Weaving lived up to Gerola’s definition and quickly gained national attention.

Todd Stong

Sources:
Image courtesy of the artist
Correspondence with the artist
Pawtucket Times Archives
http://www.donaldgerola.com/

Wind Rotor

Situated across the Blackstone River, Wind Rotor is a prime example of the kinetic sculpture of artist Donald Gerola. Monumental in size, the sculpture is best viewed with the downtown Pawtucket skyline on the horizon, as it mirrors various rooftop weathervanes across the city moving in synch with the wind. At one point a node of cables in Gerola’s installation Weaving, a project that probed the history of Pawtucket and its relation to the natural landscape, the Wind Rotor provides a key parallel to Pawtucket’s industrial past: that of mechanical movement driven by nature, the same as the mills were powered by the coursing Blackstone River.

Gerola, who studied physics at the University of Dayton, Ohio, says he enjoys the structural challenges presented by including kinetic elements in his sculpture. The son of an engineer and a pianist, the artist has had a fascination with both beauty and mechanics for as long as he can remember. After his university studies, the aspiring Renaissance man became enamored with supergraphics, a method of expanding and altering the perception of a place using colorful geometric or typographic designs. Eventually, Gerola moved to altering space as it exists in three dimensions, and not just on the walls of building—sculpture provided a context for the artist to seamlessly bridge engineering and design.

Todd Stong

Sources:
Image courtesy of the artist
Correspondence with the artist
http://www.donaldgerola.com/