By Hannah Kebede
Elm Staff Writer
As children, many people enjoyed playing in sandboxes and John Ruppert, former chair of the Art Department at the University of Maryland, is no exception. The only difference is that his sandbox was an archeological dig in Petra, Jordan, during his days as a Boy Scout. Back then, Ruppert never imagined that his love of making things, taking them apart, and putting them back together, would one day lead to a successful career as a sculptor and professor.
Fifty-three years later, Ruppert had created multiple sculptures utilizing various mediums, including metal, stone, and wood. Some of these are currently exhibited in Washington College’s Kohl Gallery as the first grain of sand in the new Sandbox project.
Sandbox was born in the mind of Professor Alex Castro, director of the Sandbox initiative and professor of art at WC, beginning as a conversation between himself and Ruppert as a plan to foster “collaboration between the creative arts and the sciences.” Castro then built Sandbox to “uncover a freshness of vision through the juxtaposition of interdisciplinary approaches—using processes that others may not see” and expose “students to unconventional, non-linear attitudes toward problem solving, preparing them to enter the world as creative thinkers capable of adding fresh insight to any field. Through this discourse between disciplines, new sensibilities grow and unexpected results are the norm.”
The Sandbox initiative, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, brings artists, called Distinguished Visitors, to campus—and, of course, their art. The Distinguished Visitors will give lectures, performances, and complete short projects that join the creative minds of faculty and students in different disciplines for experimental interactions, called Sandstorm events.
John Ruppert is WC’s first Distinguished Visitor in the Sandbox. He describes sculpture making as a “two level process;” first the idea, an inception that can take minutes or even years to come about, and second the physical making of the work. The creation of art itself too uncovers new ideas, that web out into more ideas that build upon the original piece of art and its original idea, planting Ruppert back in the more expansive and time-consuming level one.
The making, level two, is a progression that can be as short as twenty minute, the amount of time it took for him to create his chainlink ‘Crucible,’ or several months, like the time it took to make “Sunken Grid with Strike and Boulder.”
‘Crucible,’ as explained by Ruppert, plays with lights and shadows, representing the ethereal. Meanwhile, his casting work is more grounded and earthly. All of his art is made to “capture and create physical phenomena.” Although his style has evolved over his years as a sculptor, the same themes have cycled through his work, becoming richer and richer, each time they were revisited, in a “subtle growth.”
Ruppert works directly with materials and processes to create his sculptures, and has also worked with scientists and engineers to generate a piece in a 3D-printer. That cooperation between the arts and the sciences is the duality and complementation that the Sandbox initiative at WC hopes to encourage.
“At a time of renewed awareness of our relation to the environment, Sandbox investigates and celebrates both the natural environment, and by extension, its relation to the built environment,” detailed Alex Castro. “This is the dialogue that Ruppert wants us to consider. And it is the consequences of our understanding of this dialogue between our actions and those of the natural world around us that will shape our environment in the years ahead.”