He Lost Fingers in an Accident. Now It’s Inspiring His Art.
BEACON, N.Y. — It was a hot day on Oscawana Lake. John Powers hosed down the dog, then started on some woodworking chores outside his lakeside cottage home in the Hudson Valley.
When Powers is stationed at a table saw, he’s usually making artwork. For his practice, he crafts small blocks that he assembles into otherworldly geometric sculptures. The futuristic objects he shows at galleries can comprise hundreds or thousands of pieces, like digital drawings rendered in real life. But on May 19, Powers was cutting decorative caps for the fence: a handyman task to please his wife, maybe impress the neighbor.
- otherworldly : 내세의, 저승의, 상상적 세계의, 비현실적인, 공상적인; 초자연적인; 별세계의. -li·ness 명사
He was four or so cuts in. Then something went wrong. The block kicked back and struck him in the face. The motion dragged his left hand through the saw’s thirsty blade. One bad cut at a tool he’d relied on for 30 years.
In a flash Powers lost his ring finger and thumb. His index and middle fingers were nearly destroyed. A grueling delay awaited, as the first ambulance to carry him from the scene stalled out on a hill near his Putnam County home.
When he finally arrived at the operating room, he pleaded to hospital attendants. “I’m an artist. This is part of me, this is integral. Like, hey man, I’m not a flake, I work in a way that’s closer to what you do.”
For Powers — who trained in creating realistic bronze statues before he turned to abstract forms — the injury threatened his career. The injury also revealed a paradox. Over decades, he has refined a process to hide his considerable craft, the artist’s touch, so to speak, in order to produce seemingly factory-made objects that remain inimitably his own. But every single component is the product of precision and control.
In the weeks after the accident, Powers endured surgeries, including one to restore the severed thumb, then another to remove it again, after the digit mummified and died.
In the months since the accident, the artist gradually returned to his practice. The first piece that he built was a most-miniature coffin for his recovered thumb, which he buried in his yard in a ceremony attended by friends. “Under My Thumb” played. A gallows humor has guided Powers’s recovery. A tiny grave marks the spot.
His next project is more elusive. Through physical therapy, he is remapping the territory between his mind and his hand. He has grappled with ghostly sensations, similar to phantom limb pain, mysteries in texture and perception. He has fought to keep doubt at bay.
- hold/keep somebody/something at bay : (적 등의) 접근을 막다, (문제의) 발생을 막다 (=ward off)
This project also involves enlisting other sculptors to design custom prosthetics. These will take the form of wearable attachments that will fit over his “th” and “fi” — how he describes the residual lower digits remaining on his hand. These may be purely aesthetic, even ornamental or bizarre. For people living with disability, the possibilities unlocked by digital fabrication are wide open. For Powers, it’s a problem to solve through art.
- prosthetics : (의족·의안·의치 같은) 인공 기관[삽입물]들, 보철(의족·의안·의치 같은 것을 제작해서 끼우는 것)
This project, the artist says — referring broadly to recovery and reorienting, in his practice and his body — is the most important work he has done yet.
Powers was born on Chicago’s South Side. His mother studied at the Art Institute and worked as an interior designer. His father, who died in 2019, was an ordained Episcopal priest who marched with Martin Luther King Jr. in Selma, and later found his calling as a clinical psychologist. Powers grew up in South Commons, an integrated development he calls “utopian.”
After his parents split up, he attended elementary school in suburban Oak Park, across the street from the home and studio of Frank Lloyd Wright. “I was seriously indoctrinated with architecture as a grade schooler,” Powers says.
He had trouble learning how to read. Art was always his outlet. By his senior year, he says, he spent most of his time in a ceramics class. One of Powers’s teachers — he flunked her class — told him about a colleague who worked at a bronze foundry in the Pacific Northwest. Powers was entranced by the idea of apprenticing under a master. He kept after the teacher: Doesn’t the foundry need an apprentice?
Riverdog Fine Arts had an opening. So Powers borrowed $50 from his dad and hitchhiked from Chicago to the foundry in Chimacum, Wash.
The job didn’t pan out but Tom Jay, a sculptor and back-to-the-land environmentalist who built the foundry, took on Powers as an assistant to help finish a monumental project, “Salmon Woman and Raven,” a Native myth in bronze. For the commission, Jay had to create a 12-foot-tall ring, a 16-foot-long canoe, two full-size human figures, and scores of salmon — an enormous assortment of statues cast in bronze. Today it holds pride of place in Highland Park in Bellevue.
- pan out : (특정 방식으로) 전개[진행]되다
Powers lived on Jay’s land, without running water, in a shack that he built out for himself. Early on, Jay asked his apprentice to go make shelves in the woods, giving him tools but no instructions. Powers still carries Jay’s lesson from that day: “If it’s beautiful, it will work better.”
Powers learned to sculpt, mold and cast. He worked with Northwest School modernists such as Hilde Morris and Native carvers alike. And he learned how artists lived.