Charlie Brouwer Exhibition
May 2009 - November 2009

Historic Downtown Wilmington, NC

Artist Statement
I’ve been making outdoor sculptures since 1989. My first ones were usually made of treated wood. When I became concerned about the health and environmental risks of treated lumber I quit making them. Then when moving to rural Floyd County I learned about woods with good natural, outdoor weathering qualities that farmers have been using for generations. Locust is traditionally used for fence posts that “will last 100 years” it is one of the hardest and most weather resistant wood in the world and hemlock wood is used for barn siding. Both are harvested locally and available at area sawmills and some of the locust wood I use comes from our own property. On many of them I use a Sherwin Williams preservative stain for color and to protect them. Maintaining them is similar to the maintenance on an outdoor deck.

Most of the sculptures here are recent and available for sale with prices ranging from $1000.00 - $7000.00.

Installations have given me opportunities to work with a variety of places, spaces, and materials. They have provided contact with people in contexts other than traditional gallery settings. The temporary nature of installations allows for more experimentation, flexibility, and larger scale. Audience participation can be greater and when an installation fills a space, viewers are often able to walk into and through the work. Sometimes I have invited whole communities to become engaged in the process by loaning me the ladders I needed to create an installation about the community.