Out of Shape

Object d'Gun: A shotgun becomes something else entirely. credit: Courtesy of Andrew T. Crawford

Atlanta artist Andrew T. Crawford first focused on everyday objects as subject matter when he was a student at the Rhode Island School of Design. Anything in his path was fair game to be cast in bronze: shoes, chairs, musical instruments—even bread and fruit—as he endlessly explored the concepts of realism and abstraction and how they often overlap. Now the thirty-eight-year-old sculptor’s arsenal includes yardsticks, scissors, nails, baseball bats, and even shotguns; he transforms them—by bending, twisting, enlarging—until their original usefulness has been eclipsed.

“Shotguns,” Crawford says, “are high-precision tools that also have to function in conjunction with the human body. If you make one little gesture or alteration, it drastically changes it.” A yardstick, for example, is worthless if it’s not straight, but it takes on new value when it is manipulated into something unpredictable.

Working in metal, wood, and stone, Crawford is continually exploring what can turn a realistic object into an abstract piece of art, whether by manipulation of the object itself, or the scale, or the material. “A very realistic, recognizable nail becomes abstract art if it’s three hundred times its life size,” he says.

In creating the shotgun piece Bang!, Crawford first bought an 1890 John Manton double-barrel. In full-scale drawings, he “bent” it, took it apart—trigger, trigger guard, hammers, barrel, receiver—then sliced it, bent it more, and welded it into its new shape. A solid steel bar replaced the barrels, and the stocks were recarved out of wood. A local foundry made a mold, and through the lost-wax method emerged a bronze shotgun with the exact details of the original. But none of its usefulness. The first of an edition of twenty-five was made in 2005; just over half have been sold, and he is already toying with the idea of a new silver-plated series with a burnished finish.

“Sometimes contemporary art can be so off-putting,” Crawford says. “You don’t need a Ph.D. in art history to look at my work. And when people see these things and they don’t understand how they’re made, that’s completely okay with me as long as they look at them.”


Learn More