Biography
Robert Lyon is a Distinguished Professor Emeritus from the University of South Carolina. For 38 years he taught ceramics, glassblowing, and sculpture at LSU and USC. Since his retirement in 2015, he has been a full-time studio artist.
He has been the recipient of many awards and grants, which include a National Endowment for the Arts Visual Artists Fellowship in sculpture, and a Southeastern Artists Fellowship from the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art. Lyon has been an artist-in-residence at Artpark, The Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, Banff, Canada, Arts/Industry Residency Program - John Michael Kohler Arts Center, and was a resident fellow with the 2009 Windgate International Turning Exchange (ITE). He has been an invited participant at the Emma International Collaboration in Saskatoon, Canada, and the Echo Lake Collaboration, Newtown, Pennsylvania. In 2014 Robert was awarded an Individual Artist Fellowship in Craft from the South Carolina Arts Commission. He has taught woodturing at various schools including the Marc Adams School of Woodworking, John C. Campbell Folk School, Peters Valley School of Craft and Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts. Additionally, he has demonstrated woodturning at many venues including the AAW National Symposium, Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts, Swiss Association of Woodturning, Geneva, Switzerland, Yeoju (YIT) Institute of Technology, South Korea, and many AAW clubs in the USA.
He is represented by Momentum Gallery in Asheville, North Carolina, and resides in Columbia, South Carolina. You can find him on the web at: www.robertflyon.com
Artist Statement
My interest in cylindrical forms began early as a ceramics and glass student in art school. Over time, architecture, especially the forms of Italian architect Aldo Rossi, small granaries from the Ivory Coast, and the ancient towers of Iraq, were main influences on my sculptural forms. Thinking about making finials for some of my clay and wood pieces, eventually led me to the lathe.
My early turned work using pencils originates from an interest in memory. My mother had died, and she had suffered significant memory loss during her illness. Her dementia made me confront the fragility of our brain and how easily decades of recollections and thoughts can be erased. Working in my sketchbook, and experimenting at the lathe, I began to realize that graphite and erasers would make good visual metaphors for the way our brain works. A mark made with graphite is like our memory, easily smeared or erased, never permanent.
Some of my pieces have played off my observations as a beekeeper, as the pencils in cross-section have been grouped together so they take on a honeycomb pattern. In the others, I have experimented with encasing, sawing, and splitting pencils, and their erasers. In these works, the pencils echo patterns such as the vertical structure of the vessels and the cellular structure of the wood, along with abstracted patterns of the interiors of the pencils themselves.
My interest in combining pencils, erasers, sanding disks, cork, Tampico Fiber, and other objects into my turned vessels/objects continues to hold my interest. With these objects and images, I strive to make my work challenging, intriguing, compelling, inspiring, and beautiful.