I am an artist living in Ithaca, NY. I have worked as a sculptor and in graphic design my whole life. I have a huge interior space where my imagination runs wild. I am my own best art buddy. My art studios are all over my house. I get lost in my process and materials, obsessing over things like primers, paints, waxes, inks and glues.

Inspired in the early 1970s by Buckminster Fuller, I started connecting stick and picks together, end do end, using nothing but Elmer’s glue to make little towers. I loved constructivist thinkers like Vladimir Taitlan and Pablo Picasso.

My sculptures are each a game, They follow rules and logic. They are Math without numbers, spatial math. I often let gravity do the work of defining the angles and patterns in the piece. Toothpickery soon became a weaving process which is a little like MineCraft in the real world. By adding chair cane, my sculptures take on lyrical lines and a way to be volumetric. With the use of upholstery thread, they became about tensegrity and kinetic movement. Adding buttons and beads and paper gives them spots of color. Elmer’s glue, bees wax, and acrylic paint bond them. Each project ends with the next idea in mind. It never fails, I have never run out of ideas.

Like Rumpelstiltskin, I am creating objects of art by weaving together the ubiquitous, the quotidian, and the ephemeral, instead of his straw. My work is sculptural basketry. Tatlin meets the Appalachian Craft tradition and beautiful organic forms take shape.

"When I first met Gerry Monaghan, it was early morning and I was making my way through the Commons to go to work. He was in the middle of the streatery / restaurant row doodling what looked like a giant sun with a smiling face. I couldn’t quite make it out when I passed by, but the art wasn’t what seized my attention and the attention of the other passersby who stopped, paused and observed what Gerry was doing. What seized our attention was that Gerry was drawing on the road with a stick.

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With an old dowel rod, a dollar-store chalk extender and some duct tape, Gerry had made himself a five foot pencil with which he effortlessly marked up the street. Standing perfectly still in the middle of the road later to be crowded by pedestrians, he glided the chalk across the ground like a child drawing circles in dirt. 

“Why would you make it here,” I asked.

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“It’s the perfect place,” he stopped and rested his fist on his hip to look at me. “With all of the people sitting outside, it’ll be nice for them to have something to look at.” 

Standing in front of me, he was the spitting image of Matisse in the later years of his life, with the addition of a lure hat. I never knew Matisse, but I also imagine that Gerry had a friendlier disposition. We waved goodbye and I headed to work like everyone else, but I knew I would be back to see what he’d drawn. And I knew I would have to speak to him again. 

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Gerry’s been drawing since he was young, he told me. After he left school he went on to become a graphic designer creating what he calls “disposable art.” He worked in publishing and eventually worked up to a position where he was able to design the packaging for Campbell’s soup, but looking back, he says the work lacked the thing he works to instill in his art today. 

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“I spent my whole life doing that kind of commercial art, which to me is disposable art,” said Gerry. “It was wonderful and at the same time, I would make something and they would go and print four million of them, but those four million pieces are all in the trash now. To make commercial art is inherently to make disposable art.”

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- What Washes And What Doesn't, Ithaca.com, Glenn Epps, September 16, 2020