For 20 Years, Fred Borcherdt Has Wrestled Our Connection With The Land From Stone, Steel And Wood. By Margaret Regan FOR MORE THAN 20 years, sculptor Fred Borcherdt has presided over the Tucson valley from a house and studio perched high above Ventana Canyon. He can see Baboquivari and Kitt peaks miles west of town, the Santa Ritas to the south, and everything in between. Over the years, he has watched long ribbons of roadway unfurl across the desert floor and houses take root, as people spread from one end of the valley to the other and marked the land with signs of their occupation. Coincidentally or not, Borcherdt has long been preoccupied by the human tendency to mark our presence on the land, and his monumental sculptures in stone, steel and wood reflect that. "It's something humans have done since the first person piled rocks on one another," Borcherdt says. "There are all different kinds of ways we still do it. It's like making sculptures: you're signifying your existence. Everything I do is a marker in a sense." Named this year's Stonewall artist at the Tucson Museum of Art--the 13th such artist from the Southwest to win the honor--Borcherdt has a one-person exhibit at the museum showcasing his works from the last 20 years. His beautifully crafted sculptures are not easy to characterize. They have a contemporary, pared-down look, but they incongruously combine historic materials from different technological eras. Rocks of the Stone Age mesh harmoniously with Iron Age metal. Timeless wood is polished or painted. The works' colorations are subtle, but gorgeous. Gray rock pairs with rusted metal; odd industrial hues like lime-green or orange color hand-forged steel. About a third of the pieces in the exhibition are from his Markers series, the most literal being "Descanso," a 1998 stainless steel cross embedded in stone. It memorializes the rest stops in Mexican funeral processions, Borcherdt says, and by extension calls to mind the wooden crosses planted along roadways to pinpoint an accident victim's place of death. It's tempting to connect the artist's Markers to the human scarrings of the desert during the recent decades of explosive growth, but he discounts the notion. His art does grapple with the tension between connecting with nature and conquering it, but the matchbox houses that have taken root below the mountain are functional structures, Borcherdt says, not the metaphorical markings he has in mind. He aims for work that creates a sense of place. "A lot of the pieces are kind of personal markers of places that are significant to me," he says. "That information is not necessarily in the title, but in a sense they're autobiographical." "Momentum Marker," for instance, a 1991 stone and wood piece, came out of a lightning strike on a friend's ranch in the San Pedro Valley. A mesquite tree was damaged and Borcherdt carved the trunk into a zigzag, easily recognized as a universal symbol of lightning. The slash of wood, now smoothly polished with characteristic Borcherdt craftsmanship, is set between two rough boulders, each of which in turn has been given additional marks by the sculptor. The artist incised the boulders with lines that suggest a stonework wall, or reaching back earlier in time, a petroglyph pecked onto rock. Like "Implement No. 8," 1982, a sort of giant stone-and-steel slingshot, many of Borcherdt's works seem to be tools, though which tool in particular is impossible to say. The pieces in the Implements and Artifacts series suggest historic objects whose useful life is now over, abandoned wheelbarrows or plows or hooks, mutated and somehow sanctified by the artist's hand. He often finds the accidental souvenirs of previous occupants on his property--pot sherds or buttons or bits of old tools, writes TMA curator Joanne Stuhr in a catalog essay. His sculptures, meant to be erected outdoors, are intended to replicate that experience of serendipitous discovery. Borcherdt's own need for a house led in a direct way to the techniques he uses in his art. In 1970, Borcherdt bought the land on the mountainside, and lived in a 1920s caretaker cottage on the ranch below until the house was ready. His first task was to build his own road. "I didn't know any better," he says. "I bought a bulldozer and built a quarter-mile long road. It took all the mystery out of stone." Along the way to the end of the road, Borcherdt learned quarrying and blasting techniques, a "formidable challenge (that) gave him the skills to work with stone as a sculptural material," as Stuhr notes. He also taught himself old-fashioned blacksmithing techniques, so that he can work his metal when it's hot, manipulating it into snake-like twists ("Feat Marker," 1991) or curled nails ("Spur Marker," 1996). Borcherdt may have been one of the first human residents on the mountain, but he hasn't been the last. He's made at least one sculpture as a protest against what he calls, in a stroke of understatement, "the spoiling of the neighborhood." "Frog Mountain Barrier," positioned near the entrance to the TMA show, takes its name from the title of a Charles Bowden book that excoriates the corruption of the Catalinas. Borcherdt's 1988 sculpture has a twist of angry metal rising up from an artful assemblage of polished stones. Like most of Borcherdt's evocative amalgams of stone and metal, this one's ambiguous. Is the sharp-hooked metal an angry defender of the pristine land? Or does it signify the triumph of the developer? Contemporary Southwest Images XIII: The Stonewall Foundation Series, "Fred Borcherdt: Twenty Years," continues through May 2 at the Tucson Museum of Art, 140 N. Main Ave. Hours are 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday through Saturday, noon to 4 p.m. Sunday. For more information, call 624-2333.

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