Interview with Scott Weaver

(Photo: Wired)

This is the interview I did with Stick Art / Sculpture artist Scott Weaver (during my thesis days) last December 22, 2015. The interview was over the phone (I was calling from the Philippines) and it was a really great experience for me especially because he was just so nice!

Where do you get your inspiration, especially when thinking of ideas for your work?

As a kid, I always loved building stuff and I have a lot of time to myself so I really loved drawing and building things out of small things. So when my teacher showed us how to build little toothpick sculptures, I really got hooked on it and loved it. And I went home and started building my own. And then it became bigger and bigger. And then I put a Ping-Pong ball in my sculpture, and the balls rolled a little bit and then I just made it—everyday I’d go on a couple of foot higher and I’d loved doing it.

Do you have a certain process that you follow when planning and/or doing your installations?

 There are many different processes that I use. Sometimes I have to build structural-like-engineering-type-stuff to hold the sculpture, like placing. And then sometimes I work on a project away from the sculpture and build it aside from the sculpture and then install it a couple of days later or a couple of weeks later, once it’s done. So over the years, I’ve developed different kinds of triangles, engineering with arches, to do different forms of structure and if I’m planning something, I make, I try—everything is not in scale so it’s kind of whimsical. So it’s kind of fun—I don’t use any measuring as far as like a bridge being the side it should be for a building—it’s all kind of cartoony. So there are no rules when I do it.

What are the usual problems that you encounter in creating your sculptures, and how do you solve them?

Sometimes I run into problems where I'm trying to make the ball roll kinetically because the function of the kinetic part aspect of the sculpture with the balls rolling through, I need to make sure that one area is bigger and higher than the other in order to get the ball into a certain area so when I run into a problem where it won’t work, I have to re-structure or cut a hole into one of the main beams or something of the sculpture, but that’s kind of fun because there's no rules and I can do that by cutting a hole and then re-structure around that to make it strong all the way around so that there could be a pathway going through any part of the sculpture which helps a lot because some mediums like you do, like ceramics—you can’t really change things—with toothpicks, you’re able to change things and it makes it really inviting for me because I can build anything I feel. (Laughs)

Do you use a specific kind of stick/material in building your work? What made you interested in this kind of stick/material?

It’s all toothpicks. Everything is toothpicks. The toothpicks that I used I get from different places but for the whole outline part of it, the whole structure is made of toothpicks—some might be different brands, people bring me toothpicks from all over the world because I like to use different types. But for the most part, they’re all toothpicks.

Like for your (recent) project, Weaver’s Winter Wonderland, there are a lot of people that are intrigued by your work. How do you invoke your audience’s feeling of intrigue?

The people that respond to the Christmas thing every night is really wonderful, but the toothpicks, people think I’m an engineering genius. (Laughs) They just love it. They go “Oh my God, this is the most amazing thing that I’ve seen in the world!” People can’t believe that I’ve spent 41 years of my life building one piece of art. And that’s the fun part of it. There are times where I would work on it for days or weeks and other times I wouldn’t touch it for a long, long time like for a year because I have a wife and a son. There’s a big Exploratorium in San Francisco and when people come there from all over the world and they see me there and I roll the balls down, they go “Oh my God, what gave you the inspiration?” When they’re intrigued by it and they loved it so much, it just drives me to want to build more. Because I love making people happy, I love making people use their imagination and what could be made out of toothpicks. It’s just a small tiny piece of wood that we use to clean our teeth and people go “Oh my God, you made this big, giant”—it's 9 feet tall and 9 feet wide and 3 feet 6 so it’s like the size of 5 refrigerators, that’s like the analogy is. And people from all over the world just really enjoy the fact that it really looks beautiful like San Francisco, but then all of a sudden you put balls in 15 holes and they roll through it, they’re like “Oh my God, what kind of like a crazy man” but that’s what makes it fun—it’s when I took a small household item and no one would think that they can make something fun out of and make something beautiful that actually works.

Are you familiar with the picture book “Where The Wild Things Are” by Maurice Sendak?

I do remember “Where The Wild Things Are”. But, I never read it or saw it.

If the book would be involved with mixed media art, do you think Paper Twine and Toothpicks suit the picture book “Where The Wild Things Are”?

Let’s see, Paper Twine and Toothpicks. You’ll be doing it, building it on a piece of something? Yeah, that sounds neat. That sounds really neat that you’re going to do that.

 Do you know any other artists who are also into these kinds of mediums?

Yeah. Not paper twine, I never used paper twine. But there’s a guy named Stan Munro from Syracuse, New York—he built a thing called Toothpick City, he’s an amazing guy, well, friend. There’s also a guy who built a 25-foot Queen Mary ship out of toothpicks named Wayne Kusy. But for some reason, I’m the only one that we’ve been able to find out that builds toothpick sculptures that have balls roll through them. Did you see any of the videos of the balls rolling? That’s what makes it fun. Kids love it when the balls rolling in.

Some of these new stories came out wrong. Five generations of our family grew up in San Francisco. My great-grandfather came from Italy to San Francisco and so my mom was born and raised there, my grandparents were there. And so there are parts of the sculpture—there’s a house--my mom’s house, my grandparents’ house, 5-18-12th Avenue, which is the house that my mom was born in, is in the sculpture. And the Ferry Building—the clock tower on the lower left corner, that clock tower has the time my mom was born on it, my life was born on it and the time my wife was born on it. So people really love the aspect that I included those times of birth, makes it personal.