The Drummer

A standing figure about thirty inches tall, mounted on a varnished wooden block with broad amber grain. The body is a long found branch, gnarled and twisting, that loops into a hollow curve above its base like a creature crouched and about to strike. Two pale, tapered wooden sticks rise from this trunk, each whittled to a point. One stands upright near the head, carried on a slim metal armature sleeved in a bright helical spring. The other reaches forward at the end of an arm that behaves like no arm at all: a bent metal rod gripped at its tip by a coil spring that clamps the wooden shaft. Read together, the two sticks held aloft on their springs give the work its title.

At the top sits a carved wooden slab, darker and redder than the rest, pierced by a round hole that reads as an eye. Its notched silhouette suggests a muzzle in profile, snout open and turned downward, though the animal refuses to be named and the identification stays open. A small hooked fragment of wood floats lower, near the jawline, where the armature meets the body. Between the slab and the trunk, the neck is a run of coil springs and one dark twisted segment, chain or wound wire, standing in for a spine with its workshop version.

The spring, or rather the springs, do the work here. Robert Bibeau takes ordinary pieces of hardware and assigns them the duties of flesh: a neck, a wrist, a shoulder joint. The carefully carved animal head loses its bearing once borne on this undulating metal neck, while the springs gain weight from their promotion to anatomy. The scene rests on that strain. Half beast and half mechanism, the drummer seems frozen a fraction of a second before the stroke, a suspended gesture that belongs to an archaic imaginary without illustrating any specific myth.