Sherman, at a milling machine in Boston’s Nexus Machine Shop and Gallery in 2015. Image: Courtesy of Mary Sherman

“Mary Sherman’s work straddles painting, sculpture, installation, and performance,” writes international curator Lanfranco Aceti in his preface to a catalogue of Sherman’s creations recently issued by MIT Press. Sherman has been teaching at Boston College since 1993. Aceti interviewed her for the publication, titled Mary Sherman: What if You Could Hear a Painting.

You consider yourself a painter, right?

Yes. Although I know I’m probably the only person who would call me that. It all depends on one’s definition of painting, I suppose.

I began with a fairly academic training, only to slowly become much more interested in the physicality of paint itself (versus its ability to create credible illusions of three-dimensionality). This led me to treat oil paint almost like it was clay. My paintings grew so heavy that they could stand on their own. And then one day I came into the studio and thought, “Why not just leave them there on the floor? Who said a painting has to be on a wall?”

For one exhibit, I put nails on two opposing walls. I hung some paintings on one wall and some on the other and left some lying on the floor and some standing. I thought of the whole room as a painting, and every so often I’d go in and change its composition. For another piece, called Bolts of Blue, I stretched a painting between two facing walls, thinking, “Who said a painting has to just sit on one?”

Then one day, in 1998, I got stuck. I wanted to make an updated version of a Baroque ceiling painting—what would become An Urban Sky. I painted 16 panels front and back, with the idea that the panels would flip over to suggest night changing to day. It never occurred to me while making them that I’d need a motor and a certain amount of engineering know-how to make it happen. At that point, I didn’t know what a gear head or servomotor was, let alone much about the difference between AC and DC power.

I was made really miserable by this realization, but then someone told me about a retired engineer, Peter Lindenmuth, who sometimes worked with artists. I immediately called him up, and he offered to help. To keep costs down, he agreed to work out the gearing and mechanisms; and I agreed to appear at the drop of a phone call to machine the parts, even though I had never done anything like that before. Every part would be custom made.

Sherman’s An Urban Sky (1999), oil on wood, newspaper, motor, steel, aluminum, papier-mâché. Image: Courtesy of Mary Sherman. Click image to enlarge.

In less than three months Peter taught me the basics of how to machine aluminum and how to weld. And even when I welded the piece to a metal table, and nearly caught the workbench on fire, Peter unflinchingly continued to tell me I was doing fine. Like everything in his machine shop, no part of our project was as straightforward as it sounded. The strap on the welding goggles had long ago worn out, so I had to partially hold them on and weld at the same time. Not only that, the shop’s goggles were so old that it was difficult to see out of them. Peter and I would have to synchronize turning off the welding torch so that we could safely remove our goggles and gauge my progress. There was also a day when we had to move 10 boxes to find the table saw. Then, after we had the piece assembled and the panels rotating, I panicked: The piece looked too big to fit in my car. Peter was unfazed. “We can just cut off the back of your car,” he suggested, assuring me that it could be welded back on. Luckily the piece fit, with absolutely no room to spare.

Peter and his machine shop were a new world for me—a place where anything and everything seemed possible. Although it might take us awhile to locate the screwdrivers, the metal lathe and milling machines were always in top form. Opera was broadcast on Sundays (at full blast). And every evening at seven, the work stopped so that Peter could make dinner for whoever was still there. I’ll never forget one day saying I couldn’t stay for dinner and, all day long, everyone encouraging me to stay. Finally I testily asked, “What’s so special about tonight that I must be here for dinner?” Turns out it was martini night.

I could go on, but suffice it to say that Peter and his machine shop (and later his friends George Bossarte and Walter Lenk, who taught me to program) changed my life. Any idea I had, they helped me do it. One day, I asked if we could make a painting move across a room (for Le Matin de La Nuit/Ballet Mecanique). And, after a short pause, Peter exclaimed, “Cool! Let’s get George.” Meaning, the answer is yes.

Mary Sherman ’80 teaches studio art at Boston College and has exhibited works at the Central Conservatory in Beijing, the WUK Kunsthalle in Vienna, and the Boston Sculptors Gallery. She has written about art for the Chicago Sun-Times, the Boston Globe, and ARTnews, and 29 years ago, she founded the nonprofit TransCultural Exchange, “to foster a greater understanding of world cultures through artist exchanges, global art projects, and educational programming.” The text here was drawn and adapted from Mary Sherman: What if You Could Hear a Painting by permission of the International Society for the Arts, Sciences, and Technology. Copyright © 2016 by ISAST.