David M. General, born at Six Nations in 1950, emerged in the 1970s as one of the most inventive Haudenosaunee sculptors of his generation. Initially self-taught as a woodcarver, he quickly expanded into stone, developing a sculptural language shaped by his own Haudenosaunee heritage as well as other historic and modern sculpture.

In due course, stone became especially important to General and rather than forcing these stones into rigid forms, he responded to their weight, grain, colour, and density, allowing the material to guide the sculpture’s final character.

In the present work, Whirlwind, David M. General transforms the weight and permanence of stone into an image of almost explosive movement. General was drawn to the whirlwind as a form capable of holding opposites together: natural force and human emotion, destruction and renewal, physical mass and surging energy. As an early account of his practice explains, he combined “a powerful force of the whirlwind in nature with the turbulence of human life,” before transferring “this energy to his sculpture in green serpentine [1]”.

The stone does not merely represent a whirlwind. Its curving planes, concentrated lines, and passages of open space draw the eye inward, making the form appear to turn around an unseen centre. Norma Dinniwell observed that “the play of line leading into the void becomes important in Within the Whirlwind,” with its openings adding “an element of mystery [2]”. General makes the void as active as the stone surrounding it: the sculpture seems to gather, spin, and release energy, while its dense serpentine body anchors that movement in the earth.

2. ibid.