The clean fusion power of Patrick Bermingham’s man-made horse
There is an element of narrative suspense about walking into Patrick Bermingham's towering, built-with-his-own-hands hangar of a studio, deep in the country.
One approaches it with a foreboding of revelation, not unpleasant but almost physically agitating (such is the anticipation) as though you're about to turn a corner into the laboratory of someone in a Bond or Frankenstein story who, quite possessed, is working on something about to be unleashed on the world.
Patrick greets you smilingly there at the door, and it opens upon - you can barely take it all in with a single sweep of the eyes - this imponderably massive near-mythical apparition, a creature standing what seems to be nine or ten feet high on its platform.
It's a horse, or rather the conception of a horse. A life-sized steel draught horse, sculpted from handworked metal, bent into panels and curved into hoops, as I said, by hand.
Her name is Judy.
A guy I know had this horse, Judy," Patrick explains, and he'd take her a kilometre into the forest where he'd cut trees and she'd haul out lumber and find her own way out.
Such a remarkable horse."
Judy took hundreds of hours to make, and Patrick had the help of assistants John Pegg and Ron Phillips.
Soon she is going to Pickering where she will stand, as close to forever as physical matter can hope to get, outside the new firehall there.
The horse is an animal whose character is impossible to express meaningfully by any other than poetic means. You miss the mark if you say it has four legs, big head, stands just this tall and runs.The real horse has raced past you.
It is, after all, a kind of poetry unto itself, a grandeur of rhyming parts, exciting our admiration just by being - simply flaring its nostrils, bending its head or standing stock-still in the afternoon, its coat waxed bright with sunlight, let alone running at full gallop.
Patrick Bermingham has lived with horses, passengered himself on them, loved them and, more recently and this brings us to our point, sculpted them.
If by poetry we mean any of the arts, then the horse is a sculpture - more than any other art form - unto itself.
So Patrick does not aspire to literally transcribe the horse's body with whatever material he's working with - be it clay, bronze steel or even paper maquettes. He broadens, enlarges, dramatizes, the way we perceive, appreciate and think of a horse.
I build up (the horse) by layering sheets (of metal) rather than modelling (the horse's shape)," Patrick explains.
The outcome is richly expressive and teasingly disorients us, as though form, flesh and motion were being refracted through a prism. Patrick's horse emerges from a lively angular traffic of beveled surfaces, angles and hinged planes and through a complementary play of arc and curve, hoops and bands of strapped steel, massed together in a cohesive whole. The resulting fusion - horse - seems the necessary and only form in which its own immense forces can be contained.
The style of the sculpture is . . . highly dynamic, not high realism," he says.
The piece is recognizably a horse but abstracted, a vigorous animated style which emphasizes the movement or strength of the horse . . . rather than the detail of the muscle and bone."
It is a style - the faceted surfaces and shifting planes - that Patrick has developed over decades. In the horse his style seems to have found an ideal vehicle.
The name of the project that Patrick has been commissioned to do by the City of Pickering - he won the commission in a field of 40 candidates - is One Horsepower."
That title is Patrick's. It alludes to the horse as a source of energy, strength, power, which is especially apt for a public art sculpture in Pickering, famous for its power plant.
Still to this day we've never found a more suitable way to describe power than using the standard of a horse's strength," says Patrick. Horsepower."
He notes that the horse is a wonderful source of energy, more efficient and cleaner than perhaps any other. It leaves no carbon footprint, helps fertilize the soil and in the history of Pickering and most other communities, like Hamilton, it cleared the land, ploughed the fields, created roads, skidded timbers, and responded to fire emergencies.
In the work area of his studio are strewn books about and studies of horses, photographs from various angles - all part of Patrick's research. There are studies for other work he has done, commissions he has won (the excellent piece of his outside the nurses' union building) and some he hasn't which one hopes he will realize some day because they look so good.
But I suspect that the greater part of his unique understanding of horses comes from his own experience of them.
The studio building is constructed to accommodate monumental work, and the work itself - with metal, iron, steel - is monumentally exacting.
He and his two assistants manipulate, turn, bend and join 3 mm thick sheets of iron - using their hands, levers and crowbars.
Hard work but Patrick wouldn't have it any other way. It's his dream. He's been sculpting since he was a boy. As an adult he studied under the legendary Henry Moore's apprentice, Sir Anthony Caro.
For much of his life he devoted himself to running the family business, Bermingham Engineering, which did enormous projects internationally - bridges, marine construction, foundation piling. Since the family sold the company several years ago, he's done sculpture full-time.
He couldn't be happier and the joy of it speaks in every detail and syllable of his work.
One Horsepower" will be unveiled at the new Pickering firehall on Brock Road in May.
Jeff Mahoney is a Hamilton-based reporter and columnist covering culture and lifestyle stories, commentary and humour for The Spectator.jmahoney@thespec.com