Sculptor tries to ‘let the wood do the talking’
Rockport-based artist Morgan Faulds Pike is known for carving for pipe organs — and more abstract creations
ROCKPORT — Since 2001, sculptor Morgan Faulds Pike’s signature public achievement, the poignant, 12-foot-high bronze and granite “Gloucester Fishermen’s Wives Memorial,” has stood in Gloucester’s Stage Fort Park, its figures gazing sadly out to sea. The artist’s plaster scale model of it is on view at the Cape Ann Museum in the exhibition “In the Round: 20th Century Cape Ann Sculpture” through June 23. She has another in her studio.
Where to find her: morganfauldspike.com
Age: 71
Originally from: Wilmington, Del.
Lives in: Rockport
Making a living: Commissions and sales. “Anything I can find to do,” Faulds Pike said.
Carving for pipe organs has been “my bread and butter over the years, but it’s not constant,” she said. Her largest pipe organ façade, at Indiana
University, is 40 feet high, with life-size figures carved in walnut.
Studio: Faulds Pike’s workspace overflows a one-bedroom in-law apartment in her brother’s home, where she has lived for five years. There, she carves wood on two heavy oak work benches their father built, and stores scrap wood beneath. Gouges fill several tool drawers (many are antiques: “The steel is so much better in the older ones,” she said); mallets to pound them sit atop a nearby shelf. Their mother, Betty S. Faulds, was an amateur artist, and her artwork — a woven rug, a fish painting, bird sculptures — is everywhere.
How she started: After Faulds Pike received a BFA in sculpture at Boston University in the 1970s, she took a fiveyear post as apprentice organ builder with CB Fisk Inc. in Gloucester.
“They had this incredible woodworking shop. Charles Fisk allowed everyone to use the shop anytime they weren’t working on organs for their own projects.”
What she makes: The figurative sculptor masterfully conveys nuances of anatomy in clay, bronze, plaster, and wood. But she’s maybe most passionate about abstract wood carving.
“I try to let the wood do the talking. There’s often no way of knowing what’s going to happen. You just have to believe it will become something — it’ll become itself.”
How she works: Patiently. The length of pearwood Faulds Pike has on her worktable now has been waiting for her for decades.
“I’ve had this in my menagerie since 1977. It was in my backyard when I first lived in Rockport. It was a pear tree that died in the backyard. It was just so beautiful.”
Advice for artists: “Work begets work. Whenever I’m stuck or feeling lazy, I think of myself going over to my bench and picking up a tool and saying, ‘Work.’ As soon as you do that, more work just comes.”