The Seed

Here, gratitude for Jake Seniuk and his beautiful writing about the Seed exhibit currently on display at the Port Angeles Fine Art Center. He sees the work:

"A pairing of then and now by Bainbridge Island artist Kristin Tollefson expresses the seed theme in its very imagery, as well as in its power to bridge the decades. The crayon scribbling of her Mother’s Day Card (1973), age five and a half, is typical of the first inklings of landscape stirring in many a tot.

Tollefson’s yen for the third dimension, however, is already there too, as she builds up the flat surface by gluing strands of colorful yarn to trace plant stems with raised lines. Flash forward thirty-four years and yarn and flower have evolved into mixed media wall sculptures, three-dimensional drawings that combine fabric, beads, wires and metals into enlarged plant forms, whose textural amplification of line and shape appeals as much to the touch as to the eye."

More of the exhibit and Jake's lovely prose here.

40blooms

I've embarked on a 40 day art celebration of my 40th birthday at www.40blooms.blogspot.com. The daily entries will continue from November 14 through December 23, 2007.

Lawn Branding

Imagine a sculpture that leaves a resist image by suffocating the grass below it.

Flora Bicycle Racks

These racks are designed to line up in sequence to form a full bloom, or to stand individually as floral gestures. See the racks in person at Florera Greenlake in Seattle, down the street from Gregg's Greenlake Cycle, by the end of November. (Update 3/12/08: The racks are now installed and available for use!)

WaterLogs + Leaf/Hull in the summer

Twig

A new wall sculpture for private commission -- reconnecting with wire on a larger scale. Featured in the Northwest Sculptors slide show.

Refuge

This past weekend was the Arts in Nature Festival, sponsored by the Nature Consortium at Camp Long in West Seattle. In addition to the festival performances, artists use the 1930s scout cabins as spaces within which to mount artwork relating to sound and installation.

Refuge explored the idea of the small dwelling as sacred space. Using light, sound, scent and handmade artistic elements, the work underscored the sweetness of the intimate and the transcendent aspects of the cabin’s interior.

Upon entering the cabin, the viewer experiences a surrounding sounds of water, recorded at Swan Lake, Montana, earlier this summer, and mixed into a braided loop of sound, all by the artist. This is accompanied by the smell of baking bread and glasses of water and plates of bread on the table surfaces. Low-hanging lights illuminate the lower bunks of three beds, made up with white sheets and paper quilts constructed out of architectural house plans, vintage encyclopedia pages, and botanical illustrations drawn by the artist.

Notions of minimal existence, solitude, and comfort emerge from this sensory envelope.

Bead/Flow

Now on display at Port Angeles Fine Arts Center, Bead/Flow is comprised of hundreds of translucent plastic beads remaindered from the costume jewelry industry in Providence, Rhode Island and repurposed as organic growth on the surface of a decaying log.

Webster's Woods is open to the public during daylight hours year-round, and can be found at 1203 E. Lauridsen Blvd. in Port Angeles, WA, ½ mile east of Race Street behind the Jones Street water dome. Admission is free. http://www.pafac.org/

Bubblering

I am spending happy time with this piece after it returned from a year and a half at the SeaTac Airport. Made of steel and lampworked glass pips, which are caged in sleeves of knit tinned copper wire.

The Growing Line

From February 12 to May 5, 2007, an installation entitled The Growing Line is visible at all hours of the day and night in the Tacoma Contemporary (TaCo) windows of the old Woolworth's Building. Located at the corner of 11th and Broadway in the living heart of downtown Tacoma, the piece is best seen on foot.

Using wire as a drawing tool, lighting, cast shadows, and the play of actual drawings on the wall, I created a handmade, industrial growing environment that changes as the light changes throughout the day.

Haven

This weekend, I was fortunate to participate in a group show in Pullman, WA, curated by Samantha DiRosa. Titled In(n) and Out of Nowhere, it took place in 12 rooms of the Cougar Land Motel for one evening only. Each of the rooms was transformed into an installation that answered the question, "How does the space perform?" Samantha explains, "The artists were asked to transform the room, while considering the motel room’s many potential contexts. There were some challenges, however: artists were not allowed to remove any contents from the room, and they were prohibited from using the room as a traditional gallery space. They would have from check-in time to 7pm to install, and the room would be returned to its original state by check-out time the following day.

This project brought together artists and architects from the Palouse region as well as the Seattle area. Their diverse installations gave form to such themes as travel, transience, isolation, desire, and the boundary between public and private space, among other ideas."

The link to photos of the show on Samantha DiRosa's website is here.

More Montlake

The opening reception at the Montlake Community Center was amazingly well-attended on a wildly stormy night last Friday, January 5. It was great to see so many people who had been involved in the process of the work from the preliminary interview for the artwork opportunity through the final delivery and installation. Here's a shot of the work in the plaza with the new addition by Carlson Architects in the background. Read more about the project on the Office of Arts and Cultural Affairs' website.

Leaf/Hull & WaterLogs

The Montlake Community Center sculpture has been installed, and the ribbon-cutting ceremony for the building and artwork will take place this Friday, January 5, 2007 from 6:30 to 8:30pm on site at 1618 East Calhoun Street, Seattle, WA.

The work is comprised of two distinct and related sculptures that flank and embrace the plaza at the Community Center. Leaf/Hull is a stainless steel form that draws influence from the tree-lined perimeter of the center's playfields and from the human maritime tradition adjacent to the site. WaterLogs is comprised of seven fir poles that were reclaimed from the bottom of Lake Union. Handcarved to suggest adze marks, the logs reference curved fingers on a hand, pier pilings encrusted with barnacles, tree trunks, and concrete pylons supporting the nearby bridge.