Eric Tillinghast is a Santa Fe artist who works with a synthesis of elements and steel. After attending school in Sweden, he began his art career in California with charcoal line drawings that became increasingly geometric as he developed and matured. Eventually he gave up drawing and began to work with steel. Finding that he was able to explore his ideas about line and space more succinctly with metal, he began making box-like constructions of varying sizes and finishes, and engraving them with lines and patterns that were geometrically ordered.

As his work with steel evolved, cylindrical shapes appeared. He began to incorporate water into his pieces by pouring it into his metal constructions, using the cylinders and cubes of steel to house this new element. His interest was no longer just with space and line, but also with light and liquid. One of his installation pieces took place in the bed of a river, where he buried steel cylinders in the earth until the lip of each cylinder was level with the ground, allowing the water of the river to fill and flow over them.

Tillinghast describes the early work of water contained in steel as "controlled, completely controlled volume," and subsequent pieces where the water was sitting in half-empty trays of steel as "confining the element, but letting it have its own will too." His current work includes shelves of steel on an elevated horizontal plane, on top of which lie sheets of water. He says of this new work that the element "is now uncontrolled, having only a surface to sit on," commenting on this evolution that "it took a while to get there, to free it all up, but it's worth it."

Tillinghast at Kohler

Gallery artist Eric Tillinghast recently completed a residency at arts/INDUSTRY, the art foundation of the Kohler Company in Kohler, Wisconsin. Residents spend fourteen weeks working side by side with employees at the Kohler factory, producing work that would be difficult to fabricate without the company's extensive facilities.