By Gilbert A. Bouchard

The North Edmonton Sculpture Workshop’s display of large metal sculptures on the front terrace of the Royal Alberta Museum might be scaled back, but it’s still big.

“Like in the past three years, we were planning a Big Things exhibition. But because of the museum renewal and centennial plans, both space and time were limited,” workshop member Ryan McCourt says of the fourth annual showing.

Founded in 2002, the North Edmonton Sculpture Workshop is a co-operative shared workshop/studio run by young Edmonton based metal sculptors. Current workshop members are McCourt, Andrew French, and Rob Willms.

“We decided to still present a show, but focus on the centennial and work with the space that was available and make it specifically about the workshop,” says McCourt.

To that end, the Alberta Centennial Sculpture Exhibition decided not to invite additional metal sculptors and focus instead on workshop members and exhibit two works per artist.

“Ironically enough, it turned out that there was as much diversity between the work of the three of us as you’d see in six or seven artists. I think this show is really going to put the lie to the conception many people have in their heads as to what metal sculpture is all about.”

For example, while the work produced by McCourt and Willms shares a common base in the familiar abstract heavy-metal sculpture work Edmonton has been known for since the ‘70s, McCourt has been experimenting with figure-work, albeit heavily abstracted figures, since 2001.

One of McCourt’s two pieces on display is a riff on the historically common rider-on-horse equestrian piece (The Pe4sistence of Tyranny) while the other is a semi-abstracted take on a seated classical figure (The Abduction of Liberty). Both are politically oriented to some degree.

“With The Abduction of Liberty, it was the idea of liberty personified, enthroned on a very abstract pedestal that’s also like the rock that Prometheus was chained to. For me it’s all about the idea of swapping freedom for security and ending up with neither.”

The pair of sculptures that Willms has on display are firmly in the abstract, welded-metal school–constructed of salvaged industrial scraps, most left over from the oilpatch or farm implements–and a continuation of the work he displayed last spring at this MFA sculpture show.

“This work is following the same path I was on, but more complex in the assemblage of the parts.”

Wilms, too, has a piece with a war-and-peace theme–Plowshares and Pruninghooks–referencing the Old Testament book of Isaiah: “… they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nations, neither shall they learn war anymore.”