Michael Binkley is a professional artist with 40 years experience working as a sculptor in a wide range of scale, stone type and idiom. His gallery and studio are located in the warehouse district of Squamish, BC, Canada – a 50 min. drive from North Vancouver.
Binkley wants to reconnect individuals to their primal instinct of touch. The sensory experience of touch is quickly de-programmed in most of us during childhood. ‘Don’t touch’ is a phrase often spoken to a child during formative years, and we learn that it is almost taboo to touch objects. This imposed societal constraint pushes our desire to touch to a deep place within us and sculpture is one means to resurface that instinct. Stone sculpture is the oldest art form known to Man and if Binkley can entice a viewer to want to touch one of his sculptures, he feels he has succeeded in making a good art work.
When carving sculpture, he tries to pay as much attention to the finishing of the piece as he does to the design – different textures are integral to the piece itself, as it supports his desire to have people touch his work as part of their interaction with a particular piece.
In our contemporary world of ‘conceptual art’ as popular art form, Binkley believes there is a missing piece that dismisses line and form, positive and negative space and composition of a discrete sculpture, which is truly valuable in aiding an individual’s interaction with art through touch.
