By Gilbert A. Bouchard

Bianca Khan knew exactly what she wanted to sculpt when she received her inaugural invitation to participate in the Big Things 4 sculpture show at the Royal Alberta Museum.

“I had all these bits that I wanted to use in a large-scale piece that would use both steel and glass,” she says.

Khan has been adding glass elements to her work, everything from discarded custom laboratory  glass work to a pair of matched salad/dessert bowls, for several years.

“Up to now, I had made smaller pieces using this technique and I wanted to see if I could carry the idea forward. It was my first big piece in a really long time and a lot of fun,” says the University of Alberta-trained sculptor.

Curated by the North Edmonton Sculpture Workshop, the Big Things 4 showing of big metal sculpture runs until Oct. 1 on the museum terrace (12845 102nd Ave.). Participating artists in the show are Simon Black, Andrew French, Peter Hide, Ryan McCourt, Royden Mills, Robert Willms and Khan.

Her work in the show is called Caesura, a word that means a pause or break in a line of poetry. Following this literary reference, Khan says her sculpture can be “read” from left to right like a poem, which means the line of architectural glass that runs along the bottom of the large middle section of the work can be interpreted as a physical caesura, or pause, in the sculptural flow of the textually inspired sculpture.

“I also see the piece being like a sailing ship of sorts,” she says of her one-tonne artwork.

Q: When did you start becoming interested in sculpture and working with metal in your artwork?

When you take a BFA at the University of Alberta, you have to take a wood sculpture class and I discovered that I liked the physical part of building pieces in the abstract portion of the class. I liked it so much that I ended up coming back to school to do a master’s degree with Peter Hide in sculpture.

Q: What is it that attracts you to working with steel?

You can put it together in a lot more ways that you can if you are working with wood or with clay. For example, while you still have to worry about whether or not the piece will stand up, you can weld a point to a point. I also like the fact that you can cut into and reveal things when you work with steel.

Q: How exactly do you build a piece like yours?

To start with, all the steel we use comes from the scrapyards and I do hold on to a lot of things I salvage. I’m a pack rat that way and have stuff that I first found seven or eight years ago. For this piece I also went down to the Architectural Clearing House and got the glass element. In that way all the parts of the piece are found objects and are all recycled.

Working on this piece was a bit different in that I did have an idea of what I wanted going in so I knew how the pieces I had would fit together (moved around in the studio using a gantry, a large block-and-tackle unit on a stand). Of course, working in large-scale steel does make you a bit more committed to your decisions.

Q: Was it hard to install such a physically huge show?

Ryan (McCourt) and Andrew (French) have installed all the Big Things shows and have lots of experience doing that, but still spent a lot of time placing the show on the site, starting at noon and going to about eight in the evening.

Their idea is that the front view of the work was positioned so that you would see it backdropped against the trees and greenery. They did a really good job and it looks like it really belongs.