Hands on

Stephen Pullan creates a collage of experience

By Jenna Russell

Mixed Media pieces by Stephen Pullan, books by Chris Letizia, and metal works by Jason Morrissey, show through Oct, 12 at Filament Gallery in Portland, Call (207) 775-0418.

HORSE HEAD, mixed-media with leather, by Stephen Pullan.

Stephen Pullan IV has one of those résumés that makes you wonder what you’ve been doing since college, besides watching TV and eating Pop-Tarts. Conventionally, the 28-year-old New Hampshire native attended Maine College of Art and works full-time as an architectural consultant, but the “Experience” portion of his bio is as packed with fascinating odds and ends as the kind of back-roads junk shop Pullan himself would mine for raw materials.

A wilderness EMT, gardener, and banjo and mandolin player who founded an environmental comedy troupe last year, Pullan has spent time biking around Nova Scotia, exploring ancient dwellings in Utah and New Mexico, and “facilitating the first clay tile roof system in the Mount Washington Valley” — whatever that means. All things considered, it’s astounding he had time to make the sculptures on view through October 13 at Filament Gallery. The show also has handmade books by Chris Letizia and delicate, cup-shaped fiber and metal sculptures by Jason Morrissey.

Pullan’s works are eclectic as his own interests, ranging from a life-size dog pieced together from shoe-leather scraps to a kind of abstract sled made of fence slats and what might be an industrial cake pan. Each has a story the viewer can invent, as well as a story Pullan can tell of its origins. He’s not afraid to make art that provokes a smile first, followed by thought. And even when slow, painstaking labor was obviously required, the constructions feel completely instinctive, not calculated.

On the phone, Pullan comes across as unjaded and unpretentious, a sweet guy who speaks warmly of his parents, his girlfriend, and his rural childhood. “I learned to work with my hands really young,” he says. “I spent time fixing fences.” A green thinker who once hauled giant puppets in a cart to avoid driving to environmental-themed performances at schools, Pullan reuses other people’s discards in his sculptures: beat-up furnishings, thrift store cast-offs. Yet the work is not intended, nor does it seem, an elaborate recycling awareness campaign.

“I don’t know if I want to knock people over the head,” the artist reflects. “The great thing is to get everyone’s varied reactions . . . so the art continues to feed me.”

Reactions will inevitably vary, because Pullan has a knack for providing elements of a story — setting, mood, occasional characters — without taking all the fun out of it by sewing up the narrative. “Annabelle’s Escape” is a large segmented assemblage of several icy blue-and-white paintings on mismatched black pieces of wood. The work is wide-open to interpretation, and clues abound. A Picasso-esque figure dominates one side, looking out with an oversized eye on mysterious icons including a moon, a running horse, a cat and a mountain. A strange midnight journey unfolds with the charged symbolism of a Mexican mural.

The marvelous origins of “Annabelle” throw light on the inner lives of artists, the way their minds skirt and diverge from popular, practical lines of thought. Some neighbors lost a horse for four months this summer, Pullan recalls, and while she was gone he imagined her equine adventures, picturing an idyllic horse commune run by the beasts themselves. His daydreams, recorded in the sculpture, have a more universal subtext than we first discern. Poetic speculations, they explore the mesmerizing tension we all feel about the great unknowns. Where was the missing horse? Where will I be when I’m gone?

“Horse Head” is a three-dimensional sculpture patched together in layers of worn tan leather nailed over an invisible wooden armature. The head is big and bulky, with wood-chip teeth in its mouth, and its toy-store playfulness is subtly weighted with references to hunting (the head is mounted like a big-game trophy) and animal rights. The leather pieces, harvested from old leather jackets found in Portland thrift stores, recombine in the shape of a lovable, familiar animal not that different from the animals killed to make the jackets. The collage-like, cut-up leather surface reminds us the materials weren’t had without destruction.

While I was at the gallery, a man came in to see if Pullan’s “Leather Dog,” seated in the window (an irresistible visual pun on the old song), was real or not. From a distance, it’s hard to tell. The scraps, salvaged from a shoemaker’s dumpster, converge in a sleek brown silhouette, head lifted in mute appeal. “Dogs provoke a reaction,” Pullan says, but, “you can walk into a room and not know a dog is there.” Toddlers will respond to Pullan’s sculpture with hugs, if not held back.

Pullan frequents the territory between domestication and wildness, and not only in animal form. The quietly affecting “Cinco de Mayo” is partially composed of perfect curves and straight lines, parts of a noble old chair; the tamed half of the sculpture meets rougher, darker wood, scratched, inlaid with color and crudely bound with twine. Pullan doesn’t judge either half the better — he carves out a more challenging role, as a wilderness guide who points out the landmarks but leaves the discovery to those behind him.

Jenna Russell can be reached at russelljenna@hotmail.com.