M.L. SNOWDEN ART
Hydrosphere
“Snowden celebrates bronze as a water medium.”
Snowden’s Hydrosphere celebrates the phenomena of water, including water in the oceans, rivers, snowcover, ice, groundwater, and water in the atmosphere.
Sea Creates
Sea Creates crashes shoreward as an opening fan. In this primary work of the Ocean Folio, the artist’s explosive sculptural technique connects, erodes and builds a single wave created from multiple smaller waves containing various actions and states. Where erosion is one of nature’s most powerful sculptors, Sea Creates not only contains innumerable figural hands, but wields five erosive directional energies including the pivotal, two side fans, and an elevated force that includes a submerged power. In this bronze, all these directional energies conceptually combine to act as one the most decisive sculptural forces in existence. As an evocation of the creative energies of the ocean, Sea Creates’ abstract wave formations suggest shapes of water, flowers, and even flames, rising ultimately as a portrait of active sculptural art.
 Sea Creates Bronze |  Sea Creates Bronze |
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 Sea Creates Clay |
Pacific Seawall
Battering salt water attacks Pacific Sea Wall. When both sizeable works of the Ocean Folio are exhibited together, it becomes apparent that Pacific Sea Wall literally streams with Snowden’s manual abstraction that has conceptually washed over from Sea Creates. Seen in this light, Sea Creates is a portrait of the erosive power of water’s innumerable hands upon the sculptural object of Pacific Sea Wall. Indeed the Wall is a high-relief that has been sculpted in varying states of dramatic deformation, where figural passages literally hang like embattled shale outcroppings on a wild sea cliff. Mounted together as a single installation, Pacific Sea Wall and Sea Creates reach out to each other forming a united bridge, evoking the practice and object of sculpture.
 Pacific Sea Wall Bronze |  Pacific Sea Wall Bronze |
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 Pacific Sea Wall Clay |  Pacific Sea Wall Clay |
 Pacific Sea Wall Clay |
Cambrian Sea Fan
The Cambrian rushes upwards as an explosive creative spirit. Indeed, the Cambrian Sea Fan radiates the outpouring of the “Cambrian Explosion”; that early and relatively short period of time when a huge influx of life suddenly appeared in the earth’s seas and was marked forever in the fossil record. The “Y” of the figural summary evokes silt river beds meeting oceans, where corals, mollusks, star fish and other forms of sea life flourish. The Cambrian Sea Fan bronze supports the largest coral formation of the group, taking its impetus from the Cambrian era’s foundational time that gave rise to earth’s bio-diversity.
 Cambrian Sea Fan Bronze |  Cambrian Sea Fan Bronze |
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 Cambrian Clay |
Valentin Sea Fan
Snowden’s Valentin fairly waltzes with motion, trailing sea-life in its wake. Valentin is the sculptor’s own term coined to describe an intermediate period of time that combines the Ordovician and Silurian eras that came between the Cambrian and Devonian eras on the geologic timeline. Despite vast expanses of time, Snowden views geologic history as a molding formational continuum that creates an underlying armature of support to contemporary humankind and the creative future of the planet. Indeed, the Sea Fan Triptych, particularly the Valentin, acknowledges geologic time as a stepping stone to earthly and humanitarian development. Such time becomes illuminated through Snowden’s advanced metallurgical passages, where the image of the Valentin Sea Fan rises as an evocation of an early marine era through its complex tabulate coral, starfish, and small mollusk inclusions.
 Valentin Sea Fan Bronze |  Valentin Sea Fan Bronze |
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 Valentin Sea Fan Clay |
Devonian Sea Fan
Snowden’s Devonian propels outward on a rushing tide. In particular, the Devonian reflects a historic period of thriving tabulate coral reefs that are woven into the Sea Fan’s abstract crown and shawl. Composed of over one hundred miniature mold systems, the laced details and intricate festoons of the Sea Fans arise from Snowden’s cutting edge metallurgical techniques. Such lost wax bronze complexity comes to particular fruition in the Devonian Sea Fan, defining the geologic period which first experienced an adaptive spread of terrestrial life and the further evolution of fish. Snowden’s sculptural meditation acknowledges that previous marine eras have contributed to the foundational and planetary matrix of humankind at the millennium.
 Devonian Sea Fan Bronze |  Devonian Sea Fan Bronze |
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 Devonian Fan Clay |
Aqualar
Aqualar sweeps a tidal wave as it crashes shoreward. At once both active and reactive, this evocation of motion interacts humankind with wave action, creating an essay of energetic continuity. Aqualar is among early works, where the sculptor’s imprint upon clay is seen to mirror larger signatures of wave action. As Snowden observes, “ In considering waves of water or waves of clay, waves are interrelated phenomena and are the signatures of the energies that have shaped them.”
 Aqualar |  Aqualar |
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 Aqualar |  Aqualar |
 Aqualar |