Robert Lemming is an artist based in Northwest Arkansas. He studied painting at Henderson State University and sculpture at the University of Arkansas Fayetteville. It is his fascination with the beauty and mystery of fossils, his love of ancient organic forms, and power tools that influence his hypnotic sculptural creations. More of Robert’s work can be found at his Instagram and website robertlemming.com. (Profile photo by Arno Frugier)

AAS: Robert, did you grow up in Arkansas?

RL: I was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, but my mother's family all lived in the Little Rock area while my stepfather’s family all lived in Oklahoma. When I was in 7th grade, I moved from the large Jenks School district in Oklahoma to the very rural and isolated Huntsville schools in Madison County, Arkansas, and that's where I ended up staying until I finished high school. There was a lot of culture shock there, but I ended up enjoying being a bigger fish in a small pond and made some really great friends. Since then, I've ended up staying in Arkansas for most of my life.
I worked construction jobs until I was 21 when I entered the BFA program at Henderson State University. I realized that if I didn’t invest in the creative part of myself, I was going to be miserable. There were some truly wonderful professors (Thomas Fernandez and Ed Martin come to mind) that really pushed my craft and challenged my biases. I did end up getting overwhelmed, and I dropped out of the program right before my senior year in early 2006. I took a break from academia and began working with a land surveying crew full time back in Northwest Arkansas. When the economy collapsed in 2008, I found myself without a job, and I also married my longtime girlfriend, Amy Smith. I was working odd jobs on my own schedule, so I mustered the effort to get transferred into the University of Arkansas Art Department at a critical time during their transition and growth in the spring of 2009.
At the U of A Fayetteville, I took my painting much further than I previously thought possible under the brilliant teaching of Stephanie Pierce, and probably more importantly, I got my first taste of sculpture under professor Bethany Springer. Sculpture brought so many of my different qualities/strengths together from color theory to power tools.
In my last semester at the University of Arkansas in 2011, I was afforded the opportunity to be an intern (I think the first) with Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art before it had opened to the public. I got to work with the Preparator Crew in Exhibitions. I loved being a part of working with curators and the museum staff behind the scenes to display and take care of the artworks in the museum. I ended up getting a job which quickly turned to fulltime in 2012. I worked my way up the ranks there and ended up as a Preparator myself, but ultimately left the job because it became too stressful, and I wanted something where I used my art skills more directly and started investigating art teacher jobs in the area. During my time at Crystal Bridges, I ended up designing a house and studio with my wife, Amy, in Madison County. We moved there in late 2014.
In the summer of 2015, I transitioned over to an Art Educator path, and I got my start with high school students at the charter school, Northwest Arkansas Classical Academy Bentonville, which was later rebranded as Founders Classical Academy. I enjoyed being able to be of service to future generations and pass on skill and knowledge that I accumulated over multiple years of schooling and research. In August of 2024, I switched over to teaching high school art at Farmington High School.

AAS: Were you exposed to art and artists growing up?

RL: Unfortunately, no, at least not in the traditional sense. I remember there was a book of beautiful sci-fi paintings by various illustrators when I was growing up, and I think my stepfather had a book on M.C. Escher that I could pour through, so I was starving for artistic content without really knowing what to look for. In elementary school, I had a field trip in Tulsa to go see the Gilcrease Museum which has a strange collection of paintings about indigenous Americans mostly and lots of artifacts from various tribes. The one thing I distinctly remember that blew me away as a child was seeing paintings by Thomas Moran and his massive-scale landscape work done mostly to help support the land conservation movement. I was amazed to see artwork that big that conveyed the natural, wild essence of the wilderness. I didn't even particularly like most landscape paintings, but his use of color and mark making really struck me, and I had never seen anything like that in person.
I discovered a lot of art in film and animation as a child. My parents had cable, so I was watching movies all the time and really loved the abstraction of a lot of sci-fi aesthetic and horror works. All my early inclinations were that I wanted to be a filmmaker though I never went down that path.
But it really wasn't until I enrolled in the BFA program at Henderson State University in 2003 that I really started educating myself more about art and artists. I would just sit in the library stacks and go through dozens of large-scale out of print books without any context of who the artists were. My dorm room was just filled with checked out art books from the library that usually weren't even required for any sort of research paper, but just my own personal knowledge. I really felt that I had to play a lot of catch up in my twenties for the lack of exposure in my early years.

AAS: Of course, I have to ask you about your interests in fossils and how this developed into your ongoing series of sculptures and art pieces.

RL: I've always had a strong fascination with the sciences and even the aesthetics that go along with them. I always loved different scientific illustrations whether it be microbiology or geological strata. And like every good red-blooded American, I went through a large dinosaur obsessive period as a child. I've always liked science museums as much as I've liked art museums, and I had a lot more exposure to science museums growing up. My stepfather had some geodes around the house, and I always liked looking at fossils.
My interest in fucoid structure fossils that bcame such a strong influence on my work for the last 14 years came about unintentionally. I like to hike outdoors in general and Northwest Arkansas has a lot of beautiful land that is relatively untouched, wild, and hard to access. I ended up working with my best friend doing land survey work during summers in between college semesters, and it was a job where you would end up out in the field for sometimes 14 hours at a stretch carrying all your water and things you needed on you all day. This could be very brutal considering how hot and how cold it can get in the region, but I love the physical challenge of it and the isolation in the woods. I had seen these fossils that locals had collected, and I heard them called bearpaws and fucoids. They said that they were fossils, but nobody could really give me any clear indication as to what they were a fossil of. They looked so ambiguous and often like a very abstract plant that I just assumed they were a fern. I was in so many remote and isolated locations where humans almost never went and there would be washed out gullies where these fossils were exposed. It was an act of commitment and slight obsession to get some of these things out of the woods, especially while I was working, because if I picked up a large rock that was 10 to 20 pounds it was quite a burden to carry it with me while I did my job all day and get it to the truck sometimes after working for hours in the sweltering heat. So only the very best ones ended up being part of my collection.
By this point around 2010, I was already finding my focus shifting away from two-dimensional art and into sculpture. I found that the things that I was naturally drawn towards were often organic, overlapping, and had very similar overall forms to some of the fucoid fossils I was beginning to collect. I decided that I wanted to use them, but I needed to do some research so I could better understand their nature. I reached out to the Geoscience department at the U of A and asked if any of them would happen to know anything about these. I was told they were from the Pennsylvania Period roughly 325 million years old when Arkansas was still mostly shallow ocean bed. The fossils were actually called fucoid structure and not fucoids. They were mislabeled due to a misinterpretation of their nature. People thought they were the algae fucoid which does create fossils; however, these were made not by any sort of vegetation but animals, specifically arthropods. They were trace fossils, like a dinosaur's footprint, and we just see the negative relief of their furrows and burrows in the ocean bed trying to find food. Essentially, they were bottom feeders, and the nature of their movement created an unintentional aesthetic that that I was captivated by.

AAS: Tell me about Fucoid Arrangement No. 8. It is a wonderfully organic form. Is it a wall sculpture?

RL: It and most of the series were designed to be wall-mounted, but I wanted it to be something like an orchid/lily growing off the wall. I made a series of casts retracing the fucoid fossil hollows in silicone molds with hot glue. In the case of the wall-based Fucoid Arrangements, I started with a variety of PVC plumbing parts that would provide areas for the fucoid “petals” to attach. Once that “head” armature was done, I would heat bend ½” steel rod to create the light, organic cantilever that I wanted. Once this was secure and satisfactory, I would begin attaching the fucoid pieces with a combination of heat gun and hot glue gun. Unlike almost any other material I can think of, I could consistently get the casts to take on new curves and attach to other pieces. With the hot glue gun and some other cast materials, I could create transitions between the fucoid bouquet and armature creating a progressively more connected work.

AAS: To achieve these organic forms and shapes, you use a variety of materials. Did you learn the necessary techniques while you were studying sculpture at the U of A?

RL: When I transferred to the University of Arkansas’ art program, I had minimal sculptural experience. I had primarily focused on drawing, printmaking and painting at Henderson. I learned a great many techniques in mold making, welding, metal bending/cutting, bronze casting, carving, etc. I found myself being drawn towards less predictable and venerable materials. I made works with fiberglass, spray foam insulation, found objects, modified acrylic sheet, and silicone production molds. Bethany helped me where she had experience, but due to the nature of my obsessions with odd materials, I was charting a path that ended up involving a lot of personal research and trial and error work. There was always something thrilling about taking a material and pushing it in a direction that was never intended. The unpredictability of the results would lead down many unique paths as I reacted to their nature. It wasn’t always a viable path, but this part of the experimental process has remained a constant in my art creation.

AAS: Burrow No. 3 is one of my favorite pieces. You created a 3-dimensional underwater experience. How did you accomplish this?

RL: In this work and the Burrows in general, I was directly influenced by the formation and aesthetics of the fucoid trace fossils. The movement given physical space and material through the fossils and their reconstruction and manipulation made me want to create my own record of movement in a physical space that could be visible to the audience. I started using sheets of transparent acrylic of a sizable thickness, and then carving through the back side to make a visual surface that has a clean aquarium-like outward facing component in a frame. The back side would be the worked surface that I carved into with heavy industrial tools like angle grinders, die grinders, and drills with different heads for all of the above. Each one made its own type of mark, and I couldn't always have complete control of what they would do. I couldn't see what they were doing in real time, because I would be working on them from the back rather than the front of the surface. In this manner I work in a reductive fashion like relief carving, but in a way where I am blind to its qualities. Creating works where I have less control, and I have to react to the outcomes was more desirable. The overlapping movements and organic shapes created by these tools were my driving force in creating these works, and I draw a very clear line between the Fucoid Arrangement studies and works with the Burrows.

Burrow No. 3 was the first Burrow that used color as part of the intended final work. The acrylic itself was a scrap I was given that had a light purple tinting. I began using a drill bit on the backside of the work and pulling back and adjusting the angle slightly while trying not to punch though the surface. I let my rotary tool and my drill do the vast majority of the mark making. As for the amber colors in the negative space, that was born out of pure frustration. I accidentally punched through the surface of the work without intending to, and I also scratched up the surface lightly. I thought I’d have to throw it away. Instead, I repaired it with thin epoxy coats, and on the back of it, I thought it needed something and had nothing to lose, so I took a propane torch to the work and lightly burned areas for that effect. It ended up making it one of my favorite works of the series and led me down more aggressive experiments.

AAS: You’ve recently started creating lighted sculptures. Burrow Lamp Variation No. 2 is beautiful and maybe a little creepy – but in a good and interesting way.

RL: I try to follow my fascinations primarily and never underestimate the audience. I typically made the Burrows by carving on thick acrylic sheets and adding epoxy for final color effects at various points in the process but making them entirely out of epoxy was an interesting change. Further complicate that with the spherical nature of the piece rather than the window-like flat projection of the previous Burrows. I loved the gentle colors of the pinks and purples contrasting the white form that is almost coral-like. Naturally occurring things like deep ocean life, microbiology, and cosmic phenomenon are constant subconscious influences. The nature of the grinder head produced the organic shapes easily enough, and like a fucoid fossil, I just kept going forward and backing out to create that explosive organic form. By hollowing out the middle, it allowed them to function as a sconce lamp, and I created some floating. The light being located directly under the work really helps it come alive, especially in low lighting situations. I consider these works almost a bridge to future works where I create my own organic molds for casting and carving.

AAS: Your chandelier Fucoid Arrangement No. 11 is a dramatic sculpture. Tell me about its inspiration and how you created it.

RL: I have really wanted to do ceiling based fucoid work, but I hit a wall with their creation sometime in 2016, which is when I created the last ones. Approaching the series again to see if there was something new to be found was intriguing to me, but I didn’t want to do it unless I could go somewhere new and simultaneously pay respect to the previous works.
So now in 2024, I found a renewed interest in the series and a completely different approach to the subject matter. I have traded out the synthetic, translucent material of hot glue with the more delicate, opaque, and historical material of paper. Instead of being an object that you direct lights towards, it is an object that is its own light source. The color of the ghostly glue is replaced with an igneous rock palette of matte and glossy blacks. I had been playing around with the concept of this paper cast work for over a year before actualizing this piece, and the final result is something deceptively rock-like and mysterious.
I've always enjoyed the intersection of art and design, and I wanted this to function as a sculptural object and as a functional chandelier. In particular, I have always loved the international style of the Art Nouveau movement from the early 20th century. In my own way I am using organic fossilized forms as my own homage to a style that I think has relevance in the 21st century. This is especially true in harsh contrast to the brutal and severe influence of the Mid-century Modern aesthetic. It is my hope that No. 11 can guide viewers to a place of mysterious awe that straddles the line between the prehistoric and the contemporary.

AAS: Although your work is very organic, it often also has an industrial feel. What kinds of reactions do you hope to get from those who see your work?

RL: I honestly like the dichotomy. It’s the natural contrast of things to me: Logic/Emotion, Structure/Chaos, Organic/Industrial, Sacred/Profane, Beautiful/Grotesque. I think humans are always finding this opposition in themselves and their worlds both natural and artificial. These contrasts are very present in me, and I end up subconsciously putting them into almost everything I do.
As for viewer’s reaction, I honestly just hope they aren’t bored. I do my best to go to places visually that are new and different from most of what I have experienced. The highly detailed yet ambiguous nature of the way I typically work allows viewers to take what they will from the works and reinterpret their nature based on their own relative experience. People have responded to the same works in wildly different ways in my experience with some seeing delicate flowers and others something more unsettling. I do everything in my power to not force them to come to any conclusion if possible. I ultimately, hope they get lost in the nature of it for even a moment and comprehend something that is without solution.

AAS: One of your very organic sculptures is 18 Verticals, 70 Horizontals. Tell me about that piece and how it came about. 

RL: That was an artistic collaboration with Adam Crosson. It was a school project that quickly grew beyond that and was over a year in the design, funding, and building of the project. We were so low on funds we ended up doing almost all the fabrication ourselves with some help from the U of A facilities. It’s the only large-scale public art I’ve done, and the only collaboration that I’ve ever participated in. Adam and I were able to find a good deal of common ground.
We wanted to create something that felt open and private at the same time. My obsessions with movement, light, organic forms, and semi-transparent qualities are all present. One of its best qualities was that it created this portal to the sky and the trees. It had the feeling of a private or sacred space, but due to the nature of the wrapping wooden strips, you could easily see people inside from the outside.

AAS: Robert, what can we expect next from you? 

RL: I have a bunch of new ideas that I am looking forward to playing with. I want to make custom formed Burrows with cast epoxy that are wall-mounted but break the rectangular frame. I want to do more Fucoid Arrangement variations. Right now, I want to do some ceramic versions, colored epoxy, and hopefully some versions of cast aluminum and slumped glass. In the meantime, I just wanted to thank my friend and mentor, Bethany Springer for indulging my unconventional tendencies, Stephanie Peirce and Thomas Fernandez for helping push my limits and grow despite myself, Samantha Sigmon for always being an advocate for me and great, thoughtful friend, Allison Hobbs for encouraging me to make new work after a long hiatus during the pandemic, and my wife, Amy Smith, for indulging my practice and encouraging me to go back to school and always being there to help me out when I’m trying to make deadlines! I hope to continue to push my aesthetic and make new work, and the rest is out of my hands!