Going Viral with Inventive Sculptures: Benjamin Pochurek

Lisa Belisle: Hello, I'm Dr. Lisa Belisle and you are listening to, or watching, Radio Maine. Today's one I really hope you're going to be watching rather than listening to, because I'm here with sculptor Benjamin Pochurek and his sculptures. I feel like I've got a whole little family around me here. It's really pretty wonderful. Thank you for bringing them, and welcome.

Benjamin Pochurek: Thanks for having me.

Lisa Belisle: We originally learned about you because you got a little bit famous there for one of those sculptures that went into the Portland Museum of Art. Let's start with our little conversation about that.

Benjamin Pochurek: Yes. That sculpture is titled Flora Lung. It was intended to be an entry piece for the Tidal Shift Award, which was a climate change themed art exhibit for youth artists like myself to create art pieces of any medium representing in some way or another climate change or climate change impacts. And I chose to utilize my personal art style of incorporating wood and metal and making it personal to me. And also this unique idea of what a post climate change world would look like. That did fairly well with the Press Herald and also with the Tidal Shift Award.

Lisa Belisle: What's notable about this sculpture is that it also incorporates this living thing, this air plant technically, I guess. But there's a real meaning behind that for you.

Benjamin Pochurek: For sure. It's the first time I've ever incorporated something alive into my art. Most of this stuff is wood, which I guess you can call alive, but it's cut wood and just cold metal. And it was this element of vulnerability or softness that I don't often incorporate into my work. I used the air plants for that, and it was this idea that the air being withdrawn from the air plants is sustaining this life, this figure that I represented. And also using that opportunity, that extra life that he's receiving from the plant, he's taking that energy to foster younger plants and potentially sustain himself in the future. And it's that kind of hopeful yet terrible circumstance that he's in that a lot of people find pretty powerful and moving.

Lisa Belisle: His posture reminds me of the Thinker. Did you have that in mind?

Benjamin Pochurek: Most of my stuff has that arched back, focused, like either protecting or just solely isolated on some circumstance. So his posture, he's regarding it very intimately and closely, but he's also huddling it in, in this manner, protecting it from the outside. His life depends on the life of those plants. Incorporating that element into it was my goal.

Lisa Belisle: You're describing something that's really common and really human. In the work I do as a doctor, when people come in and they tell me they have neck and back pain, it could be just that they're looking at their phone or their computer all day long. But also there is some element of protecting their heart and protecting that vulnerable side of themselves. And what you're describing really is a pretty significant vulnerability.

Benjamin Pochurek: Absolutely. In a way, that is his heart, that is his existence, that planter that he's holding in his lap. And I just hope to represent that fundamental necessity of its existence, because without it, the figure representing humanity would not exist. So I'm glad that got across.

Lisa Belisle: You also have this piece where somebody is leaning over looking at a flower, and it's not a living flower, but it's obviously symbolizing a flower, and yet there's some sorrow and some pain in this. Describe this piece for me.

Benjamin Pochurek: So this piece is called Defender, and it was inspired directly from the war in Ukraine, as I was watching the news coverage of the bombing of Snake Island when that first happened. My first response was to show my advocacy for Ukraine and show my support, and looking around me, I saw a bunch of other people doing that same thing. It felt like my voice in the matter, my stance on the whole issue, would be minimalized if it was just changing my Instagram bio to glory to Ukraine with the Ukraine flag or something like this. So I decided to do something a little bit more personal, a little bit more individual, and create this sculpture called Defender, of a figure representing Ukraine as a whole or as an individual Ukrainian soldier, given the yellow arm band, protecting the sunflower, which is the national flower of Ukraine. And he's supporting himself with his right hand on a pile of rubble, the destruction that the Russians have brought over to Ukraine. And on his back are these little plates of armor that have been severely warped and destroyed. One of them has fallen off by his feet. It's showing that same posture of protection and nurturing in a way towards this entity, the message of Ukraine at the moment.

Lisa Belisle: It also, for me, it evokes hope, in a sense that if he's able to defend and he's able to protect, then there is a possibility for the future.

Benjamin Pochurek: Absolutely. With every project I make, I always incorporate a new element. For this one it was color. I've never painted. I'm not a painter. I don't do a lot of colorful things. A lot of it's just brown and silver, kind of monotone, but this vibrant yellow in the center of the sculpture does give off that sense of light and hopefulness. You can also see it as, oh, this is so sad, look at this person literally destroying himself to protect what he values and holds dear. But you can also see it as a very hopeful and promising kind of sculpture.

Lisa Belisle: Is it important to be able to maintain some sense of hope as you're working with these very serious and significant topics?

Benjamin Pochurek: I think so, yes. Or you're just going to get really sad working on these sculptures. With this one in particular, I'm very hopeful that Ukraine will in some way or another prevail and be recognized always as Ukraine, or having defeated the Russians in the war. But this sculpture shows where they are right now, this struggle, this tiredness that I'm sure many of the soldiers and volunteers still in Ukraine are facing.

Lisa Belisle: I often think about this because my daughter's boyfriend was in Afghanistan not long before they pulled everybody out. That was a war that lasted the entirety of his lifetime and my daughter's. When this first happened in Ukraine, I think it was easy for us to say, oh, well of course this couldn't have happened and it's going to be over soon, but it's already been going on quite a while. It's so devastating. And the long-term impact, as we saw in Afghanistan, is really something we can't even begin to understand.

Benjamin Pochurek: It's definitely a unique stance that we're in right now, because we're viewing it as a third party. While we are involved in some ways in the war, we're regarding it more as an outside event, not necessarily a domestic one. And I think that's pretty dangerous. I've been seeing less and less news coverage of what's going on in Ukraine while the war continues to rage on. I understand people get distracted, but there are some things that I believe we need to hone our focus in on. And this is one of them.

Lisa Belisle: Tell me about this other piece. It looks as if this individual, it seems so human to me, is reaching for something.

Benjamin Pochurek: This was made a while ago for a school project, right after we finished our block on African literature at my old school. The book that we were supposed to encapsulate with some sort of project, either an essay or a poem or something, was Nervous Conditions. It's about a young girl living in Africa, her struggle for getting an education, education equality, that equality of opportunity. The base is African. So I figured it would be suiting for a pretty African themed project. It's showing the figure representing the girl in the book directly, or anybody facing this similar problem, rooted directly to her roots, to her circumstance, that's disallowing her from reaching for this diploma representing education success, and how these existing measures and restraints are keeping them back and holding them down.

Lisa Belisle: What was the unique element in this piece?

Benjamin Pochurek: It was using paper. The ribbon wrapped around the diploma, that was something that could have gone really bad or could have gone great, but I got it on first or second try. And that was something I haven't replicated, because I like it being individual to this piece. It was also the first time I did a focused figure. The sculpture wasn't necessarily larger. I've made other projects that were just a big staircase, for instance, and there was a little guy at the bottom, but the sculpture was the staircase. This was the inspiration to start making the figures themselves the piece of art, and not an accompaniment to the art. This inspired me to go on and make larger sculptures. So this was kind of ground zero for me.

Lisa Belisle: I spoke with a fellow artist, Matt Barter, and I know that you have a relationship with him. I love his work. His work is wood, but he does his own sort of sculpting, also extremely unique and figurative in its own very unique way. What types of things, when you get together with Matt, do you talk about from an artistic standpoint?

Benjamin Pochurek: Most of the time when I talk to Matt about my art, I usually have the art in my hands, and I'm walking through the door to his gallery, and he's like, whoa, Ben, that's great, let me know how I can help. And a lot of it, I'll go up to his workshop and he'll show me some materials he's not using or something that I think would be cool. We'll throw ideas back and forth at projects that we're both working on at the time. Moving up from Florida, Matt was the first person that my family met, just stopping by his gallery, and he's been a total friend and ally ever since then. So we like Matt, we like his father Philip, Philip Barter. They've both been huge inspirations toward my art and my artistic leaning toward alternative materials, and really everything that got me into art.

Lisa Belisle: Philip just had his opening last night, Portland Art Gallery, and it was truly amazing to see the body of work that was on display in the main room. It struck me that this is somebody who's been doing very unique things for probably all his life.

Benjamin Pochurek: Absolutely.

Lisa Belisle: And you're embarking on that journey from this end of things. Have you learned any particular lessons from working with people who have been doing this a little longer than you?

Benjamin Pochurek: One of the major ones, with both Matt and Philip, they definitely have their own style of art. And while I don't seek to replicate it, because I view it as their own, I think that they've both inspired me to find my own style and stick with it. And I hope that I've done that. I think that all the pieces I have can be identified as created by the same person, just with the way they look, the mannerisms, the materials used. It was more of just becoming an individual artist. Not necessarily making art, but making your art, was what they both succeeded to inspire me to do.

Lisa Belisle: What was it like moving up here from Florida?

Benjamin Pochurek: It was exciting. We didn't have any family up here. We didn't really have any friends when we first came up here. So it was just a lifestyle change, like let's do it kind of thing. In Florida, the school I was going to was more sports driven, and just didn't really embrace art the way Maine did. Once I got up here, I started playing around with, I think it was a hot glue gun and some cardboard. I was like, oh, I can make some cool things with this. And that just didn't satisfy this urge I had to make something permanent and profound. So I bought some sort of soldering iron, something for computers, and played around with that a little bit, and then eventually jumped to the welder, where I taught myself how to weld. I would never have gone down that route if I hadn't moved to Maine with this artistic pulling.

Lisa Belisle: And you ended up starting at one school in Maine and moving to a different school in Maine. My understanding is that initially, when you started doing your art at the first school, it maybe wasn't as appreciated as perhaps it currently is at the school you're at now.

Benjamin Pochurek: Sure. I mean, I'm at Waynflete right now and they've been incredibly supportive of everything I've done, from the Tidal Shift to the Press Herald interview. I'm walking down the halls and teachers I don't even have classes with will compliment my work and say, oh, I just read your article, that's so amazing, I'd love to see some more of your stuff. And just today as I was leaving, many teachers were wishing me good luck on this interview. I don't know how they knew I was going, but they knew, and their support and their advocacy for me has been really helpful. Especially considering it's my first year, and I'm dealing with all the first year stuff along with beginning my junior year. It's been an incredibly great experience at Waynflete.

Lisa Belisle: Which is not to say that the first school you were at was a negative experience, it just was a different experience. And it sounds like the one that you've moved into is one that fits you better.

Benjamin Pochurek: Yes, absolutely.

Lisa Belisle: You live in Freeport. And the piece that is behind me is one that you've done in concert with work that you have been doing for a while with a very well known organization.

Benjamin Pochurek: Right. The Wolf's Neck community, we're pretty close with that family-wise, but they reached out to me regarding some of my pieces. I think it was the Flora Lung, the one they saw. They said, we'd love to display and auction off one of your pieces, if you would, if we'd commission you to make one for us so we can sell it. And I worked on a piece called Path Maker, representing Wolf's Neck's alternative way of going about agriculture and sustainably farming, and creating this sculpture using a lot of wire, wood, and everything else I've used in the past. And right when we were about, the day we were supposed to drive it to Wolf's Neck and give it to them to auction off, my parents, they didn't want to see it go. They kind of fell in love with it at the time. So they called up and said, we can't give this to you, because we want to see it in our house. So they've had their time with it now, and it's going to go back to Wolf's Neck to be displayed in the near future.

Lisa Belisle: It's very nice of your parents to give up the Path Maker family member.

Benjamin Pochurek: Absolutely. And it'll be hard for them, but I think they'll get over it.

Lisa Belisle: Yes. Well, as I've brought up on this show before, one of the benefits of working with artists and having art available to me is that I do a lot of art fostering. So the art comes in and we foster it for a little while, and sometimes I want it to join us forever, but we're not the forever home and we have to let it go to the next forever home. So it's hard, but it's good. It's a good process.

Benjamin Pochurek: It is. That's an issue I face often when I make a piece of work. Not noncommissioned work, like Defender for instance, that was made not necessarily for me, but it wasn't made for anybody else. So if I were to give it to somebody, sell it to somebody, it would definitely be more of a hard thing to do, considering how long it's been in my house, how long I've been looking at it, things like that.

Lisa Belisle: This represents a tremendous investment of your time and energy and emotional commitment to do these pieces. They literally take hours and hours and hours of all of the above.

Benjamin Pochurek: Right. During the school year, it has been difficult to find the time away from school, on the weekends, to commit to doing art pieces. But I do my best to dedicate as much time as possible to these projects, and get as many done as possible, and spread my wings a bit with the time I have. But this summer is often when I do the most work, and I can do the most work consistently, and have a scheduled, dedicated time to each one of these projects.

Lisa Belisle: I'm interested in your choice of wood and metal, because it's not easy. Wood maybe a little bit more so, but certainly metal, having to use a soldering iron and do welding. That's a pretty big commitment, maybe a little dangerous. It's certainly a lot of work.

Benjamin Pochurek: Yes. The amount of times I've set myself on fire welding. When you start involving wood and metal in welding, which is just extreme heat and electricity forcing its way through metal, and having wood and sawdust be everywhere, a lot of stuff is often on fire, myself included. So it's definitely a dangerous activity to engage in, but I think the end goal is pretty awesome. For my choice in materials, I think that most of my stuff, just my collection of work, incorporates some level of vulnerability, as we were talking about before. It could be really easy to create something out of clay and represent vulnerability, but I view it as more difficult to take a piece of metal, some familiar and really cold material, and shape it and weld it into a shape that we can all view as objectively, not pitiful, for instance. And that emotional response, the thought that goes into the viewer looking at my work, is definitely gratifying.

Lisa Belisle: You're a junior in high school now at a new school. You've gotten a lot of well-deserved attention for the pieces that you've done. It seems like you definitely are moving in a direction that's really consistent with the artist that you probably always have been and want to continue to be. Do you have a sense of what your future looks like in this area?

Benjamin Pochurek: I want to incorporate either art or welding into anything I do in the future. I'm also really invested in politics, current events, and things like this. So art college is definitely on the table, but I might lean toward something more within the political realm. In my free time, I'm also getting my pilot's license fairly soon. So some sort of military engineer would also be a totally acceptable job for me. But I love welding, I love creating, so I think incorporating elements like welding or woodworking into my career in the future will serve me well.

Lisa Belisle: I believe I understood at one point you were, and hopefully still are, interested in going to one of the military academies. I have a brother and a sister who both went to the Air Force Academy, so I may have to put in a plug for the Air Force Academy, considering you have this pilot background. But also, what's interesting, I really felt in learning this about you, I thought of my brother Jeff, who is still in the Air Force, but he was a fine artist when he was in high school, and he went on to become a pilot and then a doctor, and now he's a surgeon in the Air Force. I think that the visual sense that he had as an artist, he's probably maintained that and applied it in really different and interesting ways throughout his career.

Benjamin Pochurek: Yes, absolutely. When I fly, there's definitely an element of memorization and finesse and technique that goes into it, and I can absolutely imagine that translates very easily into being a surgeon, or even flying a jet plane or something like this. The military academies have definitely been appealing, and representing America, serving America, these things I've always been passionate about.

Lisa Belisle: It's also interesting to me to think about these very distinct pieces. They're very solid, very grounding. There is some flexibility to them in the way that they're created, but when you fly, it's very air, you're in the sky. There's a technical aspect of things, but I know, having spoken to artists, or a cop, who also has experience with flight and incorporates air into and flight into his pieces, that's very different than the energetic feeling of the pieces that I'm seeing around me. Do you have a sense that you may at some point in the future incorporate more air, more light, into your work?

Benjamin Pochurek: I think that when viewing the final product of my work and seeing the sculpture piece at its end, it can seem very solidified and absolute. But when I'm working on it in the garage, there's definitely that light, airy feeling that you're talking about, like when it comes to flying. I'll put my welding helmet on, put some music on and zone out, and I'll come out of it two hours later and say, wow, that's a lot of progress I've made. So there's definitely this element of freedom and enlightenment that goes into creating these things. There's also a large risk that has to be taken into consideration when listening to music and totally zoning out while welding, but I do my best to balance the two.

Lisa Belisle: In both cases I can see it. Being a pilot, where you're up in the air, there's an element of danger to that. And here you are setting wood potentially on fire while you're working on metal. There's a little bit of danger to that. And also there's a lot of energy around both of these processes. Even as we're talking, the elements of the pieces, the wood and the metal, are very grounding, but the sense of them, there is a sense of lightness, even as I'm looking at them, that they're not as tethered as other metal sculptures that I've seen in the past.

Benjamin Pochurek: Sure. With my newer pieces, I've always tried to create some element or some illusion of functionality, whether that be adding a cog on a joint, or creating some sort of spring mechanism that would look like it would allow for movement. And while everything is completely welded, so it doesn't rattle around or make noise, everything's bolted together, I try to create an illusion this could stand up and walk away. I've been experimenting more and more with these kinds of elements.

Lisa Belisle: There's no doubt in my mind that if we were to leave the room and close the door behind us, these ones would be, I say these guys, but I don't really know that there's a gender specifically assigned to them. But I have a strong sense that they'd be up dancing around.

Benjamin Pochurek: Hopefully. I don't know. I've never seen them get up, but they might.

Lisa Belisle: Anything's possible.

Benjamin Pochurek: Absolutely.

Lisa Belisle: Well, Benjamin, I have very much enjoyed this conversation. And I hope that I will have a chance to continue to see your work and reconnect within the artistic community. Thanks for taking the time to come in and talk to me today.

Benjamin Pochurek: Thank you so much for having me on.

Lisa Belisle: I've been speaking with sculptor Benjamin Pochurek, and I know we're going to see quite a bit of this individual in the future. He really does have wonderful sculptures. I can absolutely understand why his family does not want to let go of them, but those of you who are interested can engage in the auctioneering process and maybe have one for your own. I'm Dr. Lisa Belisle and you've been listening to or watching Radio Maine.