Books

I've been making sculptures on books for the Celebrate! show at Studio Place Arts (up during the last half of November and December). I scavenged a sculpture that didn't quite work, and used the people. It's great to have a source of lots of characters and not have to make them all from scratch. And whenever I'm using books, there's always the frisson of feeling transgressive ("What!? You're destroying BOOKS??"), and the same thing is true about destroying a piece I've made and previously exhibited. Exhilarating!

Here's the piece. It was called Conversation.  And now it's been transformed into:

Fallilng People at the Maltex Building

The Falling People have come indoors for the winter, and will be inside at the Maltex Building in Burlington for three months.

Back in the Classroom

Many years ago I used to teach multi-age, first-second-and-third grade, in Montpelier. I got a call from Chris Abrams who had seen my work at the Kent Museum and wondered if I'd share my work with the kindergarteners at East Montpelier Elementary School, who were studying shadows and insects. I was delighted to go into Jamie O'Hare's classroom on October 10 and work with them to make button art with their drawings of insects.

Here's an image from their blog about the workshop showing me exhibiting one of the pieces from In the Web.

Full Circle

The Full Circle exhibit is only up for a few more days, so if you are able to get there, hasten out to the Kent Museum, 7 Old West Church Road,  Kents' Corner in Calais. It's open 10-5 every day through Sunday, October 7, with a closing reception including music and refreshments on October 7th from 3 to 5pm. In addition to the exhibit, there's a silent auction for the Craft Emergency Relief Fund (CERF), which you can bid on while you're there.

The Kent Museum is a beautiful old structure, and each fall it hosts a very short exhibit (this year running from September 27 - October 7). Full Circle was curated by Nel Emlen, David Schutz, and Allyson Evans. Here's the delightful Allyson (who came to my studio to select work for the show), standing by the first wall in the exhibit, where she hung work from In the Web (the biodiversity work that went to Nagoya, Japan in 2010).

 

 I believe Nel and Allyson hung most of the show, and it is a model of curatorial sensitivity.  The museum consists of many rooms of different sizes, some with white walls, some with walls stripped down to the original lath, and some with patches of historic wallpaper.  With so many different spaces and surfaces, it's amazing and delightful how they managed to place work so that it relates perfectly to other pieces and to the uniqueness of each space.

When I was asked to participate, I thought about the exhibit as an opportunity to show a "full circle" of my work, a bit of a retrospective of work from the past dozen years or so. I am so grateful to the curators for coming to my studio to select (and later to pick up) the work, and for the opportunity to have other people arrange, place, and hang the work. What a delight to come to the opening reception and see it for the first time, with pairings that I have never seen before.

For example, here's a painting from 2000, Thin Red Line, next to a button dress I made this year.

And on another wall in the same room, three pieces made in  different media in different years.

A second room of my work contains three-dimensional work with wood and found objects that I call Curious Lifeforms, as well as (what a treat to see these guys exhibited again!) two pieces from my Eggs and Nests series of paintings from the last century!

If you look out the window from this second room, you can see the apple tree hung with my steel Falling People. (And you can see a bit of Chris Miller's maze across the road.)

 There is lots of other good work in this show, also displayed brilliantly, including two rooms of work by Axel Stohlberg (always wonderful). On the mantelpiece are houses papered with sheets of writing in that beautiful cursive that has passed away along with those who produced it -- very moving in this historic location.

And I was so happy to see a whole roomful of Ken Leslie's circular paintings. 

In addition, there's Chris Miller's maze of flat stones, Pat Musick's bronze nests, delicate work by Gowri Savoor,  fiber works by Karen Henderson, outdoor sculptures by Thea Alvin and Gordon Auchincloss, botanical illustrations and watercolors by Susan Sawyer, steel-and-wood benches by James Teuscher, an installation by Sam Talbot-Kelly, mobiles by Lochlin Smith, constructions by Gabrielle Dietzel, sculptures by Chad Heise and Michael Alon, and plates with a cool story by Allyson Evans.