She lives in a house entirely given over to sculpture. It’s an ordinary century-old James Bay house with the upper floor rented out, but the ground floor is a gallery almost entirely given over to the concrete creations of Birgit Piskor.
Concrete? Yes, that’s the material of choice for this petite and voluble woman. Free-standing statuary, wall panels, even the end tables are made out of concrete. I learned, when I went to visit last week, that she grew up in the house. Like so many, as a young woman she left Victoria and worked elsewhere for a number of years. Though she was somewhat successful as a drug rep in the Okanagan, her heart wasn’t in it.
When Piskor returned to Victoria and back moved into the old home (which her father still owns), she had time on her hands and applied herself to gardening. A big part of the garden design was the hard landscaping and that was her first experience with concrete. After forming and pouring the paths and patio she tried her hand at her first sculpture, a voluptuous female who still stands amid the trees on the west side.
The feminine form was an inspiration to her when, four years ago, she began in earnest on her career in the arts.
With no training and not much experience, she created a series of elongated women, extruded from tiny toes through prominent hips and on up and up past smaller shoulders to vanishing heads. They call to mind the tall, thin, existential figures modelled by Alberto Giacometti — but sexy.
Piskor builds her sculptures on metal armatures which she wires together, and then models the forms with cement. When it comes to surface treatments she has tried many. At first they were rather smooth and had a finish not unlike bronze. Then she wrapped some in cloth impregnated with the cement, and the bandage-like surface is reminiscent of a mummy. Later she worked with her four fingers, poking indentations all over.
After the women, she created spheres which made a striking accent in the garden. Then she formed flower shapes like huge abstract petals, and finished them with metal leaf.
From the beginning she also made some striking planters in tall, dramatic shapes, though she has long since sworn off spending her time on anything functional. Though she believes that she is an outsider in the art world, she is an artist through and through.
Perhaps Piskor’s most recognizable form is what she laughingly calls “stacked doughnuts.” You may have seen some of these stacks when they were installed in front of Zambri’s restaurant on Yates at Blanshard. Circle upon circle is built up to form a sort of totem of nothing, more than two metres tall.
Fascinated by the powerful presence of these vertical icons, she has made others with a variety of simple shapes standing atop one another.
Her constant experimenting with surface led her to create a rippling effect like vertical waves, created from roughly pleated canvas soaked with concrete. She has often achieved a faceted effect as if she had chiselled the surface with a large adze. Piskor told me that really it was done by some enormously time-consuming technique which required a great deal of hand sanding. She’s no stranger to a great deal of hard and heavy work.
These surfaces have been played out in flat panels which, inevitably, are hung on the wall like paintings of an irregular rectangle shape. For these “paintings” she has shown an affinity for monochromes and her palette has been almost exclusively limited to black, white and slate grey. In fact, her sculpture gallery (and home) is almost exclusively limited to these classic tones.
But don’t jump to conclusions. Recently this artist got our her jigsaw and began making wooden armatures of amoebic form. After she had applied the concrete texture and poked her fingers into it to create a million dimples, she hauled out some acrylic paint and basted her sculptures with cadmium red, coating the surface of the relief with magenta. After all, why be a self-employed artist if you don’t do exactly what you want?
Following her bliss seems to be working for Birgit Piskor. She was recently contacted — out of the blue — by a gallery from Geneva, Switzerland, that feels the restrained elegance of her work was just right for some of its top-end clients. And her current show just opened with a private view for registered interior designers from this area.
If this keeps up, she’s going to have to hire some staff to help her move and ship the large and heavy pieces she constructs.
Until then, she’s a one-woman concrete sculpture factory and she seems to like it that way.
Birgit Piskor: Open house at her gallery/studio at 560 Niagara St., in James Bay, Saturday and Sunday, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. For more information, birgitpiskor.com. Some of her work can also be seen at Eclectic Gallery at 2170 Oak Bay Ave.
