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Portraits Dean Stahl

Julie Speidel | In search of awe, she sculpts

Sculptor Julie Speidel stands at a table in her Vashon Island studio, placing finger-sized chunks of broken stone one way, then upside down, then back to back. She's seeing how they relate to each other, how the whole will look scaled up. And she's looking for the awe factor.

She is a slight woman with a large body of work. Ideas for her sculptures come from the European megaliths and remote Buddhist temples she has visited, as well as from everyday objects she has collected, such as the eroded shells and bleached bones spread out on her workshop shelf. Even bread sliced just so, or potatoes, have fed her imagination — and then her family.

Of sculpture, she says, "I think a lot about yoga. You are in your body, firmly rooted to the ground, but are extending yourself up; it's a joining. The makers of the megaliths knew how people would stand there and be affected. I remember when I first saw them as a child, the vertical pieces — they stopped me in my tracks. That is what I like to do: Stop you in your tracks. And, hopefully, you lose yourself, in one way or another."

The right sculpture also can make a landscape harmonious. When Speidel placed a commanding sandstone-and-bronze piece in a cacophonous perennial garden, the whole place calmed down.

Speidel began sculpting full time about 25 years ago at the urging of Seattle gallery owner Linda Farris. Before that, she raised four children, made copper lamps and designed jewelry. Now, her ideas take shape in modeling clay, which she pats and pinches into miniature sculptures. The best are made three-dimensional in cardboard, and finally fabricated from bronze sheets that are shaped and welded by three craftsmen — brothers Lance and Brian Gaut, and Steve Belfrage — who can be heard grinding and polishing in the back shop. Speidel also works with stone, glass and steel.

Three-dimensional art "is how my brain works," Speidel says. Maybe it's genetic. A grandfather's first cousin invented the Speidel Twist-O-Flex watchband (imagine that pretzeling into a Claes Oldenburg megalith).

Speidel's father, Bill Speidel, helped save Pioneer Square and Underground Seattle, and chronicled the city's gritty early history. He didn't mind getting his shoes dirty. Neither does his daughter.

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