For Frode Bolhuis, The Figure Contains Life’s Mysteries and Its Multitudes
When Frode Bolhuis got his start as a sculptor, he worked classically, with monumental figures made of bronze and metal—the kind of thing you see in a public square or park. But then the Dutch sculptor discovered the simplest of mediums, polymer clay, and his art practice exploded into a technicolor world of hue and emotion. “I thought when I started sculptures, that they were meant to be black, white, grey, or brown,” he said. “That was my basic idea only ten years ago. Now I know that bringing in seven colors can work.”
Color just might be the unifying mode of his work. Each figurative sculpture Bolhuis crafts is unique in its body language and its signified emotion, but the common factor is a reliance on pastel hues. Color, he says, is in his blood. According to Bolhuis, the Dutch have more names for colors than almost any other culture. And when you have the language, the practice follows. “When you know more words for expressing the taste of wine, you can taste more different flavors of wine,” he said. “It’s about giving it names, seeing it, doing it, expressing it—then this world grows.”
The worlds Bolhuis creates are highly peculiar. Solitary figures stand—or crouch or kneel or dance—in their own universes, unbothered by what’s going on around them. But Bolhuis’ sculptures aren’t necessarily about the condition of solitude and loneliness. Each work is connected to the other in what he calls a “mind map,” in which lines radiate out from one sculpture to the next, conjuring shared affinities and interrelations.
For Bolhuis, the figure contains life’s mysteries and its multitudes. When he first started down this path, he created what he calls “self-portraits”—sculptures of white men going about their days. Now he’s drawn to the spectrum of humanity.
What keeps him returning to the human figure is its most elemental feature: the simplicity of its form. The standing figure, he says, is “the coat hanger for anything I would love to express… It has the ability to show the emotions we feel immediately. We’re so used to seeing the feelings of someone in body posture, it’s so much easier to do with a body than with abstract forms or colors.”
For example, hunched shoulders signify insecurity. Straightening up the figure conveys its power, and so on. The standing figure is to Bolhuis what the reclining figure was to Henry Moore: a space to which perpetually return to, full of mysteries that a lifetime of practice can’t hope to unlock. That’s what Bolhuis likes most about creating art—the beginning stage when the sculpture is just an idea and not yet a physical object.
“When I finished art school, I thought I was going to do monumental sculpture, big works, and I did for a while,” he said. “But what I started loving the most—actually always loved the most—was the start, where you figure out what you want to say.”
It’s the mysterious quality of creation that keeps Bolhuis coming back to the studio. His sculptures don’t begin with a roadmap, but take shape between his fingers as he sculpts. He stuck with smaller works so that he “could stay inside the creative process.”
“I was always jealous of painters because they could take a piece of paper and just start,” he said. “As a sculptor, I had to collect all these materials, make a mold, make a casting, and so on.” That is, until he found polymer clay. “At the beginning, I thought maybe polymer was too silly or too cheap, but eventually it became this beautiful adventure,” he said. Plus, polymer clay gave him what now defines his work: color.
“Color is one of the main things I do now,” he said. “It’s quite an adventure, though—it’s not easy to bring color into sculpture and that’s why you don’t see it much.”
Bolhuis finds himself guided largely by his own intuition. Polymer clay is a forgiving medium. It bakes up in under a half hour in a home oven and it fosters Bolhuis’ sense of playfulness and exploration. “I just try things,” he says. “And it’s very much about intuition, which is my main love.” With polymer, he says he “never knows what’s going to happen.”
Bolhuis begins with a small armature of metal before he layers on clay and watches as “the figure happens between my hands.” He never uses a model. Rather, the “face just happens, the clothes just happen, the posture just happens.” It’s all about finding the right composition. Bolhuis continuously asks himself as he’s making a sculpture: “Does it feel good?”
Bolhuis works somewhat like a novelist. He has a vague idea in mind of what the work will be, but as he’s crafting it, the character seems to take on a life of its own, as if by magic. His sculptures, he says, “want to live their own lives.”
When I finished art school, I thought I was going to do monumental sculpture, big works, and I did for a while…But what I started loving the most—actually always loved the most—was the start, where you figure out what you want to say.”
Bolhuis’ own life is unconventional by most standards. A few years ago, he found himself living in an expensive house outside Amsterdam with an expensive studio nearby. It didn’t feel right. So he got together with some friends and returned to where it all started: the quaint city of Almere in the polder of Southern Flevoland.
Here, where Bolhuis grew up, he and some like-minded compatriots built a row of nine houses—each nearly identical on the outside, but completely unique within—with studios attached. Building community has had its challenges. Babies were born, people died or moved on, but the community persists. “The dream holds its limits,” Bolhuis said. “It takes a lot of time to be a community and to learn that. I think it was normal one hundred years ago, but now we are used to looking only after ourselves and our own families. It isn’t always joy, but it’s always interesting.”
At the beginning, I thought maybe polymer was too silly or too cheap, but eventually it became this beautiful adventure…”
In addition to his own practice, Bolhuis teaches one day a week at the renowned Design Academy Eindhoven. The most important lesson he teaches is “that when you just start, it happens.” That just might be Bolhuis’ resounding life philosophy.
“We give the students quite difficult tasks, and it’s always amazing what they do,” he says. “If they try to understand what they’re doing, though, they can’t get anywhere. They have to understand that it might take years, but it’ll happen.” It’s this quality of the magical that seems to unify Bolhuis’s life.
He tries not to think about his practice too much. Rather than having the answers, Bolhuis resides in the space of the unknown—a realm where the possibilities stretch on endlessly but are always, somehow, within reach. He’s not sure what his work means—“maybe it’s something to do with being human”—but what he is certain of is the process. “I just love seeing what happens,” he says.*
This article originally appeared in Hi-Fructose Issue 59, which is sold out. Get our latest issue in print by subscribing today here.
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