Michael Brolly is one of two featured artists-in-residence at Blackfoot Pathways: Sculpture in the Wild this year, and he will be in Lincoln for a three week residency throughout September.
Brolly teaches woodworking at Moravian Academy in Pennsylvania and is also the current artist- and maker-in-residence at the Northampton Community College Fab Lab. The Fab Lab, short for fabrication laboratory, offers tools and instruction in woodturning, metalworking, recording equipment, a guitar lab, and more.
Despite not identifying as a musician, sound and music weave throughout Brolly's pieces. Working on a commission for Martin Guitars, Brolly designed and built a guitar resembling an alien that has a theremin built in. A theremin is an electronic musical instrument with two antennas that sense the proximity of the musician's hands to create sounds. Theremin music is often associated with science fiction and horror films.
Another of the musical pieces Brolly has made stems from his time in New Bedford, where he and his family lived while he obtained his MFA in furniture design.
"There's a whaling museum there. There were whale songs, and you could push them and hear them. I was thinking, you know, if you could talk to them, what could they teach us, tell us. They had these fabulous pictures of whales as monsters, back in the day. To me, it was like the strings on the ships probably vibrated the ship and sent sounds out in to the water and the whales came in response. I was thinking I could reverse engineer that and make a boat that I could control the sound to talk to the whales in their language, so that's how the boat building started," said Brolly.
Brolly worked with students at the school where he taught them to build the Sephira, a sailing skiff strung with musical wire aimed at communicating with whales.
Since then, Brolly has established a nonprofit and continued to work with students both at Moravian Academy and in the Fab Lab to build boats, including to scale and then model-sized during the pandemic. A student from Moravian Academy can be seen playing the Sephira in Brolly's TED talk about the work.
With an extensive body of work using materials such as wood and glass and featuring lathe-turned sculptures, Brolly said he is looking forward to creating a piece at BPSW.
"I'm amazed at the opportunity I'm being offered, " said Brolly, who added that he had a couple of ideas for his installation piece that might include birds, music, or furniture, noting "I work really intensely on what I'm working on. I'll walk around and eventually something will come to me and that seems to work. I've had relatives, people who were important to me, adults who were important to me who taught me that downtime is important. So sometimes in the downtime, I come up with some really good ideas."
Brolly will be on site at Sculpture in the Wild from Sept. 7-24 to create his installation for the park and is slated to give an artist talk at the Lincoln Community Hall, Sept. 14 at 7:30 p.m.
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