Creative Types: Clifton Cox

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Creative Types is a new editorial series produced by Smiley Pete Publishing in partnership with Creative Lexington, a local initiative that connects the public with Lexington’s arts community through professionally produced “snapshot bio” videos that highlight local artists and other creative types.

When Clifton Cox talks about sculpture, he also talks about struggle, and strength.

And looking at his work – large, metal abstractions that twist and fold through space – it’s clear that his creative process involves both.

“Metal sculpture is hard,” he said recently, walking through the Art and Visual Studies building at the University of Kentucky, where he makes sculptures through the Master of Fine Arts program. “It’s physically hard, which makes it mentally challenging. I’m motivated by challenges, and I like to challenge myself physically. I like the physical endurance aspect – I like the cuts and burns and getting dirty and lifting and moving things around, and the idea of how the metal has so much strength and integrity that you could leave it outside for 100 years and it’s going to be the same, even after we’re gone.”

Growing up in Lexington, Cox was more of an athlete than an artist. He played soccer, basketball, tennis and baseball. He was on the dive and swim teams and went fishing and horseback riding. Sometimes, though, he felt inspired to draw something – usually influenced by the gigantic metal military equipment that his father, who was in the service, took him to see as a child.

It wasn’t until he was an undergraduate student at UK that Cox discovered sculpture.

“I was kind of lost and struggling. After high school I took a year off to work, and I decided I didn’t like that, and so I came back to school to search for what I needed to accomplish,” he said. “I was walking across campus and started to notice that there was a lot of sculpture around. I found out that it was student work, and I just fell in love with it. I started taking classes and decided I was going to get down into sculpture as fast as possible.”

Much of what Cox loved about sports he found in metal sculpture: the physicality, the endurance, the sense of community and teamwork, even the “suiting up” in protective gear.

Feedback from his instructors, all of whom said to “loosen up,” caused him to swing from rigid and realistic drawings to “full abstract,” which he fell in love with. He graduated from UK with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 1998 and toyed with the option of a graduate program in sculpture.

But life got in the way, as it tends to do, and Cox took a long break from sculpture, focusing on other vocations and moving to other cities.

After a 12-year hiatus, he’s is back at it – and now it’s his work that adorns the UK campus. His sculpture “Taking Flight” was recently installed outside the university’s new School of Arts and Visual Studies building on Bolivar Street. Cox said the piece is a “drawing in space” that represents the feeling of a “eureka moment,” when an idea clicks or explodes in the mind.

He also describes the sculpture – all off his sculptures, in fact – as a product of both the present and past.

“Whatever you’re going through or have gone through in your life comes out in your work,” he said. “That’s what’s so cool about art. You’re getting to see a piece of someone: their soul, their efforts, their energy.”

For Cox, this includes many common struggles of adulthood – trying to figure out relationships, geography, professions and passions. At different times he’s worked in coaching and roofing, and for a while he ran his own landscape business. Though he left Kentucky for a couple years, he couldn’t stay away from his family and first home. He returned in 2010.

“I’m a Kentucky boy. Everything I want to do is here,” he said. “I came back with nothing, and I just decided I was going to make it work, because this is where I want to be.”

With a long history as a swimmer and coach, he found work as the aquatics facility manager at UK, where the employee education program gave him the opportunity to re-engage with sculpture.

Getting back into the metal shop has been a combination of catharsis and time travel for Cox. He finds himself working in the same building where he poured metal and built sculptures as an undergrad, but now he has more than 15 years of life experiences with which to infuse his new work.

“It’s like going back in time. It feels like being back with your family,” he said. “You don’t know what you’ve lost sometimes until you get back into it. Sculpture is complete therapy for me. It changes my mood. But I needed that time off to develop the life experiences, to go through those struggles.”

Those struggles are embodied in his abstract creations, simultaneously bright and heavy, which he said challenge himself, challenge space and challenge audiences. He likes to watch people try to “figure out” his pieces. He smiles as he explains the way the metal both catches sunlight and endures harsh elements. His sculptures, while incredibly strong, slightly sway in strong winds. All of his pieces, he said, “have a little wiggle in them.”

Immersed again in his creative process, Cox said that he’s “haunted” by metal and art.

“I can’t get away from it. Once you start something, it’s always on your mind no matter what else is going on – in good away. It’s part of that struggle,” he said. “Struggle is good.

Everyone struggles. You have to embrace it. You have to know that your fight and your struggle are going to produce something positive. You have to stick with it. You’re lost, and then something clicks. And that’s just going to happen over and over and over in your life, with everything.”

These days, he’s reconsidering an idea that first clicked many years ago – starting a landscape business that incorporates sculptures and outdoor pieces of his own creation.

In the meantime, several of his pieces are on view locally. “Taking Flight” is installed outside UK’s new school of arts and visual studies building on Bolivar Street. “Pandora” and “Mallard Stop” can be found inside Source on High, on High Street, where he also made the bike rack out front. A large piece, called “Stryker,” now adorns the front lawn of a home on South Ashland and is for sale. A little farther away, his piece called “Stealth” is permanently installed in the Sculpture Trails Outdoor Museum in Solsberry, Indiana.

He sees his public art within a continuous cycle of creation and inspiration.

“I saw a piece, and it inspired me to do it,” he said, reminiscing to his days as a student. “I hope my pieces will inspire other people to get involved in some type of art.” ss

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