One Foot in the North, One in the South

Heading into another stretch of night shift has always been both my burden and my blessing.

Every week begins with the same promise to myself — that somehow, somewhere between exhaustion and responsibility, there will still be enough energy left to create something meaningful. A new sculpture started. An old one finally completed. A breakthrough in form, movement, or technique.

That hope is what keeps me moving forward.

But if you are an artist, you probably already understand the quiet frustration that comes with time never being enough.

And strangely, it seems the problem only grows with age. Commitments gather. Responsibilities stack higher. Sleep becomes more valuable and somehow more elusive. Coffee becomes less of a luxury and more of a negotiation with the body. Even the work itself changes. As skill improves, so does expectation. Pieces become more ambitious, more refined, and more demanding of patience and attention.

The irony is that expertise often slows creation rather than speeding it up.

You begin to see more. You demand more from yourself. The appreciation necessary to sustain the momentum takes years to catch up with the labour being poured into the work.

The gap widens.

In many ways, this feeling reminds me of the transition from living in Northern Ontario back into the city years ago. Up north, I found something I didn’t even realize I had been missing — space. Not just physical space, but mental space. Silence. Wilderness. Time to wander. Time to think. Time to reconnect with a part of myself that eventually became the reason I create sculpture at all.

Living among the wild gave birth to something important in me.

The city, by contrast, moves like a rising river behind a dam. Bills, schedules, work, obligations, maintenance, family, noise — everything builds pressure. The current never fully stops. You spend much of your energy simply trying to hold the structure together while the water rises higher behind it.

And yet, despite all of that, I still find myself standing at the threshold of another carving week.

Somewhere beside all of these responsibilities, I’ve started quietly exploring another avenue for my work — one that bridges old traditions with emerging technology. I recently created a page featuring scanned versions of some of my sculptures for the growing community of artists and creators experimenting with the expanding world of 3D printing.

It has been fascinating to see traditional stone sculpture translated into a digital form.

In a strange way, it allows the work to become accessible to people who may never have had the opportunity to own original sculpture, while also opening the door to entirely new creative possibilities. It feels a little like trying to plant one foot firmly in the North and the other in the South — balancing tradition and future at the same time.

If you’d like to explore some of the scanned works, you can view them here:

White Raven Sculptures 3D Models on Cults3D. https://cults3d.com/en/users/Hops118/3d-models

Over the next couple of weeks, I’m hoping to finally complete the loon sculpture currently underway while continuing to move several other projects forward quietly in the background. I’ve learned that keeping multiple streams flowing at once helps maintain momentum, even when one current slows.

More than anything, I hope these updates encourage others to continue building lives that embrace both the science of the future and the traditions of yesterday.

I don’t think we were meant to abandon one for the other.

I think we were meant to learn how to carry both.

— Wesley Booker
White Raven Sculptures