Wisconsin Life

gentle music

Bren Sibilsky

I like to say, "I make my living playing with mud." My name is Bren Sibilsky, and I am a sculptor. I live in Algoma, Wisconsin. I've worked in commercial art for many years. And after I burned out from working around the clock putting a lot of hours, I decided this is it, I'm gonna go back to what my true passion was, what I wanted to do all along. So I went back to sculpture.

gentle music

Bren Sibilsky

I make sculptures in clay, bronze. Most of my sculptures are representational, and they deal with the human form. The Native American piece that I'm working on today has a lot of different symbolism to it. I met a very interesting historian from the area who took me to see a tribe, the Potawatomi of Hannahville. And I got to speak with the spiritual leader of the tribe and learn a little bit about their ways and feel the atmosphere of that in the story of their tribe. And I wanted his take on what I should bring to the sculpture. And he told me that it was important that it come from the heart, to use my heart when creating, and that was just perfect because that's where I like to create from.

relaxing music

Bren Sibilsky

Clay would be my favorite material. It's quick, it's tactile, you can put it in right away and it's adjustable. You get lost in it. You can almost start to feel your subject matter's feelings, and you can feel it going into the work. That piece is all about change; change being forced onto a tribe of people. It really is their story. It's not my story. In a way, I'm illustrating, from my own heart, how I felt reading the story. We're all here for a short time, really, when you look at the big scope of things, and I sometimes feel like I'm a recorder more than anything else. I'm just recording what I feel and see in this world. How many people on this planet get to play with mud for a living? I'm drawn to do it. It's icing on the cake if the world accepts you and buys into what you're doing. But if you're an artist, you have to do it.