Winged Bear

His winged bear sculpture has lived at Stormwater Studios since its return from ArtFields earlier in 2019. When his sculpture was back he found out that someone had made the bar a PokeStop for Pokemon GO, which he thought was great & got extra exercise from from playing the game himself. As an anthropologist and archaeologist whose research focuses on early hunter-gatherers, Andy White understands mankind’s urge to create. As a self-taught artist, White found a way to channel his own creative impulses into large sculptures of animals, using found objects and pieces of scrap metal. These things include his daughter’s first bicycle, which found its way into a rendering of a triceratops. “It’s a way of transforming memories from the past into something solid, with a life of its own, that lasts." Things like fossils and bones, which sparked the Ohio native’s interest in the past, a doctorate earned from the University of Michigan in 2012, and his current post as a research assistant professor at the University of South Carolina. He teaches one class per semester, while conducting research at a site north of Columbia on the Broad River, which has been continuously occupied for thousands of years. “Human beings are the hardest things to study,” White observes. “It’s more difficult to understand their nature when you add in culture. You try to tell a story [as an archaeologist] about how and why something happened, based on what little has endured.” After relocation to Columbia two years ago, he now has a garage in which to work, and a backyard in which to display his creations. An image of a sculpture of a T. rex which he posted to a Shandon neighborhood Facebook group garnered quick attention, first from friends and neighbors, then from print and television media, leading to the offer do his upcoming show at Tapp’s Arts Center. Its title, Afterburner, refers to the way a jet engine injects fuel into hot exhaust to increase thrust, adding energy to something that has already happened. White feels it’s an apt metaphor for his own practice of taking remnants from the past and crafting them into something new.

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