The first day of class at Boston University was not what he’d expected. Professor Isabel McIlvain was intimidating to say the least, and not at all impressed with the free-spirited kid from California. “What are you doing here?” she demanded. The young man stammered out an answer — something about learning sculpture. “Get me your slides,” she continued without a shred of civility. He did as he was told, and then, in front of a room full of graduate students, Professor McIlvain went through every slide, one by one. When she was finished she looked at the young artist and said, “You have a lot to learn and a lot to unlearn. You will have a very hard time in this class.”

Embarrassed and angry, Tor Archer vowed never to come back. “And I wouldn’t have except for one student who tracked me down after class and told me if I stuck it out I would learn more from her than any other teacher,” he says. “Lucky for me, I listened to him.” Professor McIlvain would, in the end, have a profound impact on Tor Archer’s sculpture. She would teach him the fundamentals and the mechanics of the craft, but more importantly, she taught him to give his sculpture a soul. “She had this way of thinking about sculpture,” Tor says. “It was almost mystical. She called it inner life. And for me, that is still the bottom line for any figurative sculpture. Does it have an inner life, a soul? It starts mechanical. Is there balance and alignment? Does it make sense? But in the end good sculpture takes on a life of its own — an inner life. It was the best thing, the most important thing, she taught me.”

They became mentor and protégé, and when the class was over, McIlvain’s icy façade had cracked — just a bit. “She would tremble when she felt really strongly about something,” he says. “And basically, when I was done and it was time for me to go, she stood there shaking and said, ‘You’ve come farther than any student that I’ve ever worked with.’ And then she paused and added ‘Now give it 20 years.’” Tor laughs when he tells the story, but 30 years later he still calls her one of the two biggest influences on his art.

The other was his mother. Growing up in Santa Barbara, Tor and his sister were exposed to the arts early and often, and his mother, an artist herself, often enlisted her son as an assistant. “Mom was a wood sculptor,” Archer says. “She had diabetes and while I was in high school the disease started wearing on her. She would get tired and ask for my help. She taught me carving techniques and told me what to do.” Eventually he started working on his own pieces — with a little push from his mother. “I found this beautiful piece of wood that I thought would be great for carving. I brought it to my mother and she said, ‘Why don’t you do it?’” That was the beginning, but it would be years before art would become anything more than a hobby.

Tor’s passion when he was young was rock climbing. He loved being outdoors and testing his mettle on vertical cliffs. “You end up having a lot of time on your own,” he says. “I would spend hours taking it all in. You can get into a kind of euphoric spiritual state. It was the experience of being in the moment.” Back then, rock climbing was not the mainstream sport it is today. Safety equipment was almost nonexistent. “Back in those days it meant taking a rope from my father’s gardening shed and then we would go scrambling up rock cliffs. It was crazy,” Tor says.

As time went on, rock climbing influenced almost every major decision in his life. He went to college reluctantly, and after a detour to a small school in Washington, ended up with his old climbing partner at University of California at Santa Cruz. “It was a complete coincidence,” Tor says straight-faced. “I knew I wanted to get back to California. And I did think, ‘Great, Santa Cruz is only three hours from Yosemite.’ But then my mother died.”

After years of battling chronic illness, Meredith Archer suffered a fatal diabetes-related stroke. It devastated her only son. “To deal with that, I turned to the studio,” Tor says. “It was my way of getting through it. I would work until all hours and then ride my bike home in the middle of the night.” He handled his grief by focusing on his sculpture, and from then on he was committed to a career in the arts. His mom started him down his artistic path when he was a boy, and even in death, inspired him to stay on course.

Tor Archer now had two great obsessions: art and climbing. In ways both practical and sometimes weird, one would affect the other. “Maybe it’s the tactile nature of rock climbing,” he says. “You are actually touching the rock, and making sculpture is the same kind of thing. Sculpture is less visual and more tactile for the artist. The hands develop their own knowledge, their own feel. And nature has always had an influence on my work, taken from observations of natural processes like plant growth and geological formations.”

It’s easy to see the influence of nature on his figurative work: metal intertwining like the branches of a tree; or layers of alabaster stone stacked like a rock stratum, somehow forming the graceful outlines of a woman’s body. Even his animal-human-machine, Mad Max-like creations have natural roots — scraps of leftover metal rescued and rearranged into a kind of sublime statement on the times we live in. The two very different types of sculpture are reflective of the artist himself: a down-to-earth outdoorsman with a quirkier side.

Case in point: At the Federal Building in Seattle some 30 years ago, Tor got a crazy notion about doing some performance art. “I dressed up like a fly (reminiscent of his animal-human forms that would come later). I made wings and even made bulging eyes out of wire mesh,” he says. Then he climbed the building without ropes — just Tor, the human fly. It wasn’t long before a crowd gathered to watch his stunt unfold, including a large contingent of police officers and firefighters.

“I remember a police officer following me up floor by floor. He would lean out of windows at every floor and ask me questions, trying to figure out if I was crazy,” Tor says. “In the end, we almost became friends.” Tor refused to stop until a firefighter perched on a cherry picker threatened to pull him off. He was quickly carted off to jail. The state charges were eventually dropped, but federal charges followed promptly. “The feds didn’t have a sense of humor,” Tor says. “In fact, I was lucky to get off with just a fine: $250 dollars, which was a lot of money to me at the time. That was the beginning and end to my performance-art career.”

Tor did find a few practical ways of combining his artistic and climbing talents. He moved to Boston with his girlfriend (and eventual wife) after she was accepted into Harvard Medical School. He got a job restoring terra cotta building facades. The job was perfect: paid well, utilized his climbing and art skills, and he learned a valuable lesson.
“I actually liked the building before the restoration – weathered and crumbling,” Tor says. “When it was done, I didn’t like it so much. I enjoyed the work, but ultimately it was clear to me that I was just fixing someone else’s work and that wasn’t enough.”

This led to a fateful meeting with the very intimidating Prof. McIlvain at Boston University. Under her watchful eye and unbending rules, Archer went back to basics. “She was incredibly passionate about teaching and sculpture,” Tor says. “She would say, ‘I only know how to teach my way. You will then do it my way, and then at the end of this you will accept what I’ve taught you, reject it or pick and choose from it.’”

Eventually, Tor and his fiancée moved back to California. He found studio space in the old naval shipyard in San Francisco’s rough-and-tumble Hunter’s Point neighborhood. He’s been there for more than 20 years now. Through a series of what he calls “small milestones,” he got into galleries, staged shows and built a career. He has done a couple of big public commissions, but still prefers to work on pieces he can construct in his studio.

Tor’s work breaks down into three basic categories: figurative, animal-human-machine creatures, and three-dimensional panel pieces. He is perhaps best known for his female forms. Sometimes he sculpts traditional figures, other times he uses metal — often copper — to create the form and give it structure. Is he making a statement on women or their place in society? He says no. “The skeletons are almost like scaffolding. I see it as holding together not trapping within. I see it as support.” The resulting sculptures are both organic and elegant.

Think of his panel pieces as modern-day hieroglyphics. They all have a story to tell, but unraveling it takes a little imagination and work on the part of the viewer. One large piece made up of nine smaller panels arranged in rows hangs on the north wall of Tor’s studio. He taps the corner of the middle panel and says, “That’s actually a bullet hole. All the metal came from the hood of an old car. I found it on my honeymoon.”

Tor likes the idea of recycling. In fact, the panel piece is mounted on recycled billboard vinyl that had sloughed off and ended up on 3rd St. in San Francisco. “Sandra Bullock and Hugh Grant are on the back of that,” he laughs. History, whether it’s recent or ancient, intrigues Archer. He likes to incorporate it as much as he can. “The wall pieces do have a certain narrative,” he explains. “I’m not telling an actual story. It’s more like a desire more for knowledge than for answers.”

His animal-machine creations are what happens when nature melds with technology in a kind of weird science project. Made from scrap metal and found objects, they are provocative and designed to make the viewer at least consider where society is going.

They also represent the artist’s own ambiguity. He’s fascinated with technology, but still believes in a more holistic approach to life. “My work is a statement about our time,” Tor says. “I see a need in contemporary society for a more grounded approach to life. Maybe as we become so ultra hi-tech oriented, it becomes more important to nurture the soul — the part that makes us human.”

Written by: Erin Clark