Intended Audience
Cole Meyerhoff’s sculptures are centered around his passion for creating and making pieces through a process that places emphasis on the physicality involved. Working with his hands has been a staple of the work that he has done throughout his life and serves as a unifying force that allows him to approach every project with a creative sense. The feeling of completion that comes from bringing a piece from concept to fruition remains a driving force behind his need to create. Materially; steel, wood and stone are all important to Meyerhoff because of their industrial and structural ties, as well as their connections to the natural world. Throughout his works, both stationary and kinetic; balance, structure and line are elements important to Meyerhoff and his artistic intentions. These principles remain fundamental to his pieces even as his recent work has displayed a shift towards more representational sculptures that focus on a desire to depict the natural environment around him.
After graduating from high school in 2011, Cole Meyerhoff was set to attend St. Mary’s College of Maryland until deciding that he was better suited to take on a gap year experience before committing to formal education. During the fall of his gap year, Meyerhoff spent time at Haystack Mountain School of Crafts on Deer Isle in Maine, studying and practicing bamboo work. From there he went to the Wooden Boat School in Brooklin, Maine, where he honed wood working techniques learned from a summer spent as a wooden boat restorer’s assistant. Meyerhoff next traveled to North Carolina where he studied fine metals in a two-month long concentration course on jewelry-making at Penland School of Crafts in Spruce Pine, North Carolina. He spent the last three weeks of the fall working as a shop hand for Albert Paley Studios in Rochester, New York. In the spring he concluded his year with a two-month long internship at The Cape Eleuthera Institute on Eleuthera in the Bahamas.
At St. Mary’s College, Meyerhoff completed a double major in art and environmental studies, focusing on sculptures that utilized both stock steel and found materials. Meyerhoff combined his passions and majors to focus the final work of his St. Mary’s Project on personal relationships, perceptions and societal issues concerning the environment, and he was the recipient of the Senior Art Award in 2016. Since graduating, Meyerhoff completed a three-month long internship and installation at Franconia Sculpture Park in Shafer, Minnesota. Other current installations are located at Horn Point Lab at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science in Cambridge, Maryland and at St. Mary’s College of Maryland. His work has been accepted to be featured in St. Mary’s College Annual Student Shows in 2015 and 2016, as well as on the St. Michaels Art Trail in 2017. Meyerhoff has exhibited at Casket Arts in Minneapolis, Minnesota and is currently exhibiting at Trippe-Hilderbrandt Gallery in Easton, Maryland.
This Artist House residency is sponsored by the Department of Art and Art History