Sculptor Daphne Pulsifer laughs at a work station inside her studio on Light House Road on the island of Monhegan. Pulsifer and her husband raised small children on the island, and she has shaped her identity as a sculptor amidst the community of artists there, she said. (Molly Rains photo)
Twelve miles out at sea on the island of Monhegan, sculptor Daphne Pulsifer often works in near-solitude.
In her peaceful, airy studio on Light House Hill Road, Pulsifer shapes her pieces accompanied by her dog, Emma, and the visitors who occasionally stop in during open hours to peruse her work.
Yet in these quiet moments of creation, Pulsifer is reflecting on the moments of true connection with others that she said inspire each sculpture she creates and have populated her life on and off the island.
Pulsifer was born in Newport to a family with deep roots in Maine. When she was very young, her family moved away from the northeast and Pulsifer grew up in New Jersey and Philadelphia.
Much of her extended family remained in Maine, however, and Pulsifer said she remained connected to the state and visited often.
“We grew up coming home to Maine every summer,” she said. “There was always this sense that Maine was home.”
As a child, Pulsifer was incessantly creative.
“My mother used to complain and say that I didn’t have any clothing that didn’t have paint or ink stains or something on it,” she said.
However, it wasn’t yet clear to Pulsifer that she would become an artist. After high school, she enrolled at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, where she intended to study architecture.
In retrospect, Pulsifer said, the move was not one she had thoroughly thought through.
“I don’t think I had a clear idea of what that could mean in terms of a career, and once I was involved in the academics of it, it didn’t hold me,” she said.
However, one thing that did captivate Pulsifer was the idea of living out at sea. For one of her classes, Pulsifer and her peers researched coastal islands, she recalled. It was through this window Pulsifer first became captivated by the island and artist colony of Monhegan.
“I thought, oh, I want to go check that place out,” she said.
Pulsifer did, traveling to the island one May while she was still a student.
“That was the big, big moment, to come here and think, okay, this is kind of cool. I think I’m going to stick around,” she said.
The natural beauty of Monhegan and the unique pace of island life appealed to Pulsifer during that first trip.
“I loved the beauty of the environment, and being able to just be present and walk around and read and draw,” she said.
After that first trip to Monhegan, Pulsifer dropped out of Carnegie Mellon. She would return to Monhegan just months later, in the fall, to spend winter on the island.
Ever since, the island has been a fixture in Pulsifer’s life.
“It just felt so natural to me to be here,” she said. “There’s been a lot of things that, you know, happen in your life, but this has been pretty grounded here for most of my life.”
“Dogs wrestling,” a bronze statue by Monhegan sculptor Daphne Pulsifer, is displayed inside her studio on Light House Road on the island. Pulsifer said dogs often appear in her work. (Molly Rains photo)
Pulsifer settled on Monhegan in 1983. Like many transplants to the island, she began her tenure on the island working in hospitality. While working at the Trailing Yew Inn and at the Monhegan House, Pulsifer also found a place within the art scene on the island. She was constantly working on different projects, Pulsifer said, often creating woodcut block prints, a skill she had picked up in college.
Pulsifer also fell in love with her husband, Daniel Bates, on Monhegan. The couple met one day by happenstance: “(Bates) was just on the road, digging a ditch,” when Pulsifer happened across him, she recalled.
The couple was drawn to one another and later married, bringing two step-children into Pulsifer’s life and, later, the two children she would have with Bates.
The island was a unique place to have young children, and it encouraged the family to be self-sufficient, Pulsifer said.
“When (Bates) and I were much younger and we were raising our children here, we didn’t have many alternatives,” she said. “We didn’t go ashore for long periods of time or even short periods of time during the winter.”
The family would move to the mainland in 1989 so Bates could go back to school, Pulsifer said. Settling in Kennebunkport, Pulsifer was glad her children could continue to go to school together. Kennebunk had a single school for children up to eighth grade at the time, she said.
Her children would eventually graduate from Kennebunk High School, and Pulsifer and Bates would continue to return to Monhegan during the summers.
Over the years, Pulsifer’s art style continued to evolve. It was Bates, she said, who made an off-hand observation that catalyzed her evolution from a printmaker to a sculptor.
“(Bates) one day said, ‘why do you bother with the printmaking? You don’t like the printmaking. Why don’t you just carve?’” she said.
For years now, that is what Pulsifer has done, shaping her identity as a sculptor and her works themselves in an array of media from wood to plaster, bronze, and blocks of blue Styrofoam, used to keep floating docks aloft, and that wash up as flotsam on Monhegan’s shores.
Daphne Pulsifer stands in the sculpture garden she has curated as a place to welcome visitors to her art studio on Monhegan Island. Pulsifer, who calls Monhegan and nearby Manana Island home, said her artwork is inspired by moments of connection with others. (Molly Rains photo)
Pulsifer loves the physicality of sculpture and the extra layer of difficulty involved in creating three-dimensional artwork.
“It’s an engineering problem almost every time where I have to consider, okay, how is this going to be molded,” she said, “How is this going to, literally, support itself, and what are the different considerations that might come into play?”
Humans, wild and domestic animals, and flowers feature often in Pulsifer’s sculptures. The ideas for her works are most often founded upon a fleeting moment of connection with another person that Pulsifer might ruminate on for years, she said.
“I feel a connection of a moment with a person, and I want to make something physical that resonates with that,” she said. “For every piece that I’ve ever made, there’s always some relationship to me personally.”
This is true also for Pulsifer’s sculptures of animals, such as dogs, which feature prominently at her studio.
“It’s about the person who was with the dog,” she said.
Pulsifer works in Edison Studio on Light House Hill Road. The studio formerly belonged to Sylvia Alberts, a friend of Pulsifer’s, a prolific painter, and an every-summer resident of Monhegan until her death in 2015.
The camaraderie and community among artists on Monhegan is very important to Pulsifer, she said.
“It’s given me permission, or it’s given me validation, to just sort of follow this path,” she said.
Pulsifer noted that, as a sculptor, she does not engage with the artist community in a typical way.
“A lot of the work I do is solitary work. I don’t work with other artists – I’m not like a plein air painter. I kind of envy them sometimes, because they can take their work anywhere and go with their friends and be a group,” she said.
However, Pulsifer communes with her artist peers in other ways, such as by hosting drawing and creative sessions in her studio, which she has done for 10 years.
Edison Studio welcomes visitors alongside Light House Road on Monhegan Island, Maine. Sculptor Daphne Pulsifer shows and creates her work in the space, which formerly belonged to Monhegan painter Sylvia Alberts, a friend of Pulsifer’s who passed away in 2015. (Molly Rains photo)
“It’s important to me to have connections even though I actually kind of work in isolation most of the time,” she said.
Pulsifer has also curated and cultivated a sculpture garden behind her studio, where some of her larger works stand among lush planted beds. She hopes visitors will find peace among the art and greenery.
“It makes me really happy when I look out and see someone sitting on the bench,” she said.
Pulsifer said she was grateful to live a life in which she is free to create every day and continue living in the present.
“I’ve always tended to be more focused on today, and then the world sort of evolves around me,” she said.
As that evolution continues, Pulsifer plans to continue communing with the creative culture on Monhegan, living her unique island life, spending time with her family, and crafting her sculptures. Pulsifer accepts that every viewer will bring something different to her work; at the end of the day, she said, she just hopes they find meaning in it somehow.
“I just hope it matters, right?” she said. “Yeah, that would be nice.”
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