Lakeland PBS presents, Common Ground, brought to you by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund and the citizens of Minnesota.

Production funding of Common Ground is made possible in part by First National Bank Bemidji, continuing their second century of service to the community.

Member FDIC.

[Music] [Music] Welcome to Common Ground.

I'm Producer/Director Scott Knudson.

In this episode, Jesse Dermody, of The Brothers Burn Mountain, takes us to the studio, but not for music, instead to show us his process of sculpture.

[Music] Hi there.

I'm Jesse Dermody, and this is my sculpture exhibition entitled Strange Forms.

It's at the MacRostie Art Center in Grand Rapids, Minnesota.

The pieces are composed of driftwood, skulls, bones, any found items that I might pick up as I go on my daily hikes.

So this piece is entitled Jesse, and it is my namesake.

It is my first attempt to do a self-portrait or a self-portrait of sorts, and it has been inspired by grief and joy through grief.

I'm a Scorpio, so this coming up right here is a representation of my joyful, griefy scorpion's tail.

It has a lot of secrets that it's willing to admit that it has, but it's probably not going to tell you exactly what they are.

These are folded wings that have the ability to take flight when needed but generally don't.

And it also has a backside.

The back side has a lot of materials that I've found, again, found through grief.

Yeah.

I am a poet, musician, and a sculptor, and we're focusing on the sculptures right now.

And it's completely my idea of sculpture, my rendition of sculpture.

I'm unschooled except how I've taught myself.

I work in the medium of found items: found ideas, found words.

But not just any found item.

It has to really stop me in my tracks as I'm walking along and make me stoop down to look closer, and if upon investigation I find it has a delicate and exquisite form, I will pick it up and put it in my bag and carry it home with me.

The barn is my studio where I keep my hordes of treasures protected, where I sculpt.

And it's in rural Akeley, out in the country, spacious.

This is, the past week, week and a half, I've been slowly tinkering with this idea here.

We'll see.

You know it might become something.

I have an idea for a background for it, too.

I can show a little more of that later on, you know, but it's not going to look like that when it's done because this is just an infant idea right now.

It might be cool to, I mean I have no real agenda exactly, but it might be cool to look at a few infancy pieces and then a couple or a few pieces that are a little further along.

You can see how each of them progresses.

The space gives my mind room to levitate.

It's great because if I ever come to any problem spots, or things that frustrate me, literally all I have to do is walk out the barn door, walk for a few minutes and come back refreshed.

It's great.

And to have those prairie views is just the soothing an artist needs.

Yeah, so, this is my interim room where pieces that I feel might be on the cusp of completedness, I like to stick them in here, stick them on the wall.

That one is complete.

It's called, Joseph.

I didn't know what to call it basically, but it's after my grandfather whose name was Joseph Joseph, and to me it has a lot of grandfather wisdom energy, and it's good to have it around.

I completed it probably two and a half, three years ago, and it's good to have in this room with other lesser completed items because it helps me figure it out, for some reason.

The piece started, see these pieces, this oak, it was an oak quarter barrel.

Old as sin, and it was just sitting in the barn here.

It had fallen apart, and it was just sitting in a pile full of cobwebs and dust and pigeon turds.

And one day I was walking past it kind of slowly meandering, not knowing how I could do any work that day, and I just in my peripheral I went like that, and I said well you know, then I stooped down and all these pieces, wow, these actually, if I worked on them, they could become beautiful.

And it took me about, you know, 15-20 minutes to figure out this formation.

And the next part of the formation was to use the rings, one inside the other, and then this was the only surviving part of the bottom of the quarter barrel.

And so it was several onrushes of inspiration and this whole piece was probably all done in my peripheral vision for some reason.

Usually ones that I like are.

If I look at something head-on it's no go.

I have to kind of, as I'm walking past not thinking about it, the idea has to occur to me.

Originally these were on here.

I think they went somewhere in here.

They came right out of there like that, and I tried them that way for a while and it felt very conventional.

I saw how I could take them off, and I can't explain why, but they they feel much better here than the way they were originally meant, in God's country, to come out of the skull.

I wish I could explain why, but I don't explain it to myself why when I'm working.

I just I try things out until it appeals to my eye.

Even if it were to be more conventional looking, if it appealed to my eye, fine, I don't care, whatever works.

I think it was white at one point and then somebody painted it that very light brown.

I had the the thought that whoever painted this thing didn't realize how beautiful of a job they were doing.

It's almost something that some painters I've seen, who I love, would do on purpose, but it was just unconscious, you know.

Probably somebody just wanted to get it over and done with and didn't realize how beautiful the sloppiness of it.

Those are abandoned pigeon eggs.

I wouldn't take pigeon eggs from a nest that was still in use.

That wouldn't be good luck for me.

So those are delicate, abandoned pigeon eggs, and they seemed important to go there and I don't know why.

It goes with a series that I'm still in the middle of doing.

This is Joseph.

There's another, in another stall, called Alice, his wife, my grandma.

There's a short series I did for my mom called Kathy.

It helps me to personify the pieces sometimes.

It gives my heart a greater inlet into what I'm doing.

So, if I I ever make a sculpture with your name on it, you know you mean a lot to me.

This one here, I'm gifting it to my brother and his wife.

They're having a baby daughter soon, and I'm giving this to them for her.

And I consciously struggled to try and find the divine feminine, so this piece to me is pure struggle.

These boards came from the rough cut one by sixes.

And my brother and I disassembled an old farmhouse built in the late 1800's in Barnum, Minnesota, which is near Moose Lake, south of Duluth there.

And this one I probably took right near a hornet's nest before I got stung.

The hornet's nest was inside of the walls, so it has a lot of history, and I just like the way it has aged.

If I gift someone a piece it means that I like it.

And it's at first rather painful, like I have a sliver in my hand pretty deep when I give it because I like it so much.

And I have something selfish in me that doesn't want to give it.

And then, once I've given it, it feels really good, like the sliver immediately got taken taken out of my hand upon exchange.

These are all a series of knots, and I like how they're all connected.

They look like mouths of, it could be birds singing or people together talking or singing.

And I like the lines.

And then like that feels really important to me.

And this goes up here eventually, maybe.

And originally it was when the whole George Floyd murder hit me and ten million other people really hard, to witness that.

And this was my piece and reaction, conscious reaction to that, and I get the sensation of beings breathing, and here's an ear to top it off.

So some presence is listening to those beings breathe.

I would like to introduce you to my good friend, Moqui.

And we get along wonderfully as friends, and to me he's quite whimsical and humorous and playful.

And his name is Moqui because his singular eye, right here, is a moqui ball, which are formed in caves.

And this one was formed in a cave in New Mexico.

It's from mineral deposits dripping from the ceiling .

And I heard a story that the natives in New Mexico, the indigenous people, used to put out these moqui balls at night on the edge of their village so that the spirits would have something to play with.

And they'd have the moqui balls to play with at night, and then they'd leave the villagers alone, as well.

They wouldn't play too many tricks on them.

It was originally begun as a shaman staff.

my brother and I were shooting a music video three years ago, or so, in the high mountains, the Rocky Mountains of Colorado, and we each wanted to make a shaman stick for the video shoot.

The video shoot never turned out as we had wanted it, so we never showed it to anybody, but the shaman stick, which was this part right here, when I came back from Colorado turned into this four-legged creature.

And it took me about two weeks to create.

And then I found this, the bottom piece, on a walk along Lake Superior.

I'm not going to say where because it's one of my treasure troves that I go to.

And I went, "My God!

There are four holes where the knots used to be, where the the legs would fit perfectly."

So I brought it home already knowing what I was going to use it for.

And it's the the base for the footfalls of Moqui.

I sure would like to invite you to come with me on a hike.

So I'm just going out on one of my several daily hikes.

Starting off from home base with my grab bag and just enjoying myself and, at the same time, keeping my eyes peeled for any little treasures I might find.

And then whatever catches my eye and makes me stop has a chance of being picked up and put in the bag.

Over the years, I've noticed that when I go on hikes there are always little things that their light or their darkness catches my eye, and I'm always, had always been stooping down and picking things up and filling my pockets up, and if I had a long sleeve shirt using it to tie around whatever I had found, driftwood or a bunch of bones or whatever.

And I'd become so burdened with not having a bag that I just started carrying bags with me on most of my hikes so that I wouldn't be caught off guard and less comfortable while walking.

Like with poetry, I'm not necessarily scouting for words all the time to write down.

It's just, words occur to me suddenly, and I better have a pen and paper on me when it happens.

So I always carry a pocket notebook with pens.

This is kind of similar to that.

Good morning.

Kind of composing as I go along sometimes or my unconscious is and it tells me something sometimes.

If I see any poison ivy I will tell you, but there isn't too much in here.

Let's see.

Here's something.

Let's see what this guy is here.

Vertebrae.

This was a large one.

I wonder if it was a buck or doe.

We will find out, in a moment.

No, we won't.

But that is cool.

Wow, that was a big one.

The top of its skull, head, eroded away because it was upside down.

It's unusual.

I've never found one like that before.

That is extra cool, and it has a couple of big vertebrae, the upper vertebrae.

That's really cool.

That can be and look at that - that's about the biggest one I've ever found for the jaw--very cool.

That's a good find I would say, right there.

Wow, even that is really cool, the shapes on these two things.

That's pretty divine.

Divine architecture right there.

Kind of looks futuristic you know, like shapes of futuristic vehicles or something.

I don't know.

I do like that.

I'm gonna stick these in here and then this baby, be careful with her, honor her.

I could imagine sticking a smaller skull of a different animal right on top of there and having a two-in-one.

Very strange.

This is a coyote hip bone that I I found about a year ago and yesterday I found a doe skeleton.

I wasn't expecting to find anything, but I was on a walk in the middle of the woods off trail and I'll show you the hip bone of the doe.

The interesting thing about this is it is shattered and healed.

And it was an older doe because the teeth in the jaw were very worn down like I've never seen before.

It was the oldest deer that I've ever, the skeleton of a deer that I've ever found, and so it probably got hit by a car in the hip, somehow survived through the pain, and healed up.

And this is the rear right upper leg bone, and it normally they're straight, and this one is hooked at almost a 40, you know, 35 degree angle.

That's pretty fascinating to me that, you know, it survived for so long.

And I've been told that the body has a way of even allowing the animal to to walk and still use that leg even though it's all mangled.

It still figures out a way.

The body heals in such a way that with the limp that the doe probably could have still walked, for some reason.

That really, really got my imagination going.

Very lucky to find it.

I've never found one like this before, just slightly broken rib bones that have healed in wild animals and that's it.

So my friend Nate Luetgers, who's a painter, one day he said, "Man, I got all these old palettes and paint brushes, and I thought of you.

Maybe you could make a sculpture out of them someday?"

And I said, you know with enthusiasm and skepticism at my own abilities, I said, "Yeah man.

Bring them over."

And he did.

We went on a nice long walk and then after the walk he took them out of his truck and gave them to me.

Let them sit for about a year, and here I am, finally, with hopefully some fruitful ideas of how they can be incorporated into this piece.

And there's another palette at the head of the piece that I've already incorporated.

My idea was to get it to a point where I can stand it on end.

Here, it's just attached.

Oh okay.

Okay if you want to put your end down.

Okay let me get out of there.

I'm going to become one with the sculpture, Jesse.

Going to have to rename this Ryan.

Okay.

Let's... you know.

Maybe I'll just stick this right in the middle.

Yeah right here.

Sure.

Wouldn't that be cool?

It would be.

Once I repair it I'll stick it there.

It'll only take me a minute to repair.

No wonder it's that heavy.

It's got stones on the bottom here.

Yeah.

Well, we can just rest it against the wall.

Something like that.

You know, maybe like that.

Without banging anything.

That one's a beaut, Jesse.

Good, a good one.

It breathes a little better in here.

Yeah.

It's a very good room.

I like it.

And then there's just the pieces that are in the van and that's it.

Yep there's seven more.

And that's it then.

The lighting in there, too, helps because it's well lit.

Yeah.

This piece is called Snapper Vision.

And it ties in to the barn and our travels together at the barn.

This right here is that skull that we found in the woods not too far from where I live, a couple miles.

It turns out that, I didn't realize it at first because I've never found one of these before, but it's an old skull that you know from a hunted deer.

And the hunter with a saw shaved off the top to get the antlers probably.

So this board is on top of that shaved off portion of the deer skull, and it just seemed like it needed a fox's skull coming out of the deer skull, and then more different deer antlers coming out of the fox's skull.

I don't know why.

And these are snapper turtle shells that I bought from a an old-timer not too far from here in the country, and moose antlers.

I don't know too much about this piece except that I like the circles, just the form of the circles, and it gives me a sense of longevity and perpetuity.

Thanks for watching.

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Production funding of Common Ground was made possible, in part, by First National Bank Bemidji, continuing their second century of service to the community.

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