vince | pabulum

Vince spent over 500 hours creating this sculpture, spending between 3-9 hours a day carving over a period of 5 months while a fulltime Chemistry PhD student.

The child and reflection were created from 12 logs of wood collected after construction work and tree trimming maintenance: skin (olive wood branches), pants (very young redwood), shirt (unknown, perhaps a young eucalyptus or sycamore). The reclaimed redwood burl slab on which the child is mounted was donated by Adam Dias.

The sculpture is not yet finished, but will be comprised of approximately 50 individually caved pieces held together with glue and wooden dowels. The redwood burl slab on which the child is mounted will be carved to resemble a river and words of the incarcerated and free artists from this zine, spoken during their weekly phone calls together will be wood burnt throughout the “river”. When finished, it will not be clear who spoke which lines.

Adam Dias generously donated the reclaimed redwood burl slab on which the child is mounted and created the redwood plaque that will accompany this sculpture for display. The redwood is featured as the background of these pages. Vince cannot express his gratitude enough for supporting the incarcerated and giving him the opportunity to carve such a beautiful material. Find redwood and check out Adam’s work at www.redwoodlaser.com.

Collaborative art between those incarcerated and those in the free world isn’t a prison reform project (though it certainly reduces recidivism). It is a project about building deep friendships and building strategies for equity in a world strained by inequities. Together we create art about racial equality, ocean pollution, and shared childhood memories.

For many students, we find the same struggles and traumas informed our childhoods as informed the childhoods of our incarcerated collaborators. We have different lives, not because we are different people, but because we did not all receive support when hurt. Pabulum was created to commemorate this discovery and preserve the freedom of these relationships whilst still connecting them back to the urgency of prison reform.

In 2018 Emile Deweaver, who was then incarcerated at San Quentin, and Vince Pane created a 2D piece on the shared human condition. Pabulum, meaning intellectual sustenance, builds on this shared humanity by depicting a child drinking and growing from the words exchanged by the many incarcerated people and Stanford students as they built relationships through their art.

“cupping my hands, I drink their words, their “art my life preserver in this melancholy sea.”” (Lorena Orozco (SU) and Bruce Fowler (SQSP))

Thank you, Michelle Chang, Netta Wang, and Prison Renaissance for helping start all these relationships.