Inside + Outside: Catch + Release installed

in the Flow

I am honored to be included in a two-person show with David Eisenhour at Port Angeles Fine Arts Center.

Entitled Two in the Flow, the show features a common thread of organic forms in a variety of materials, and is beautifully hung throughout the gallery. The exhibit is on display July 13 - October 5, 2008.

Work in Progress

The working model of the sculpture, held in place by David Strauss and ably assisted by Chris Armes, both of SHKS Architects. Constructed of a true madrona branch and red painted paper, the piece serves as an indicator of scale and overall appearance for the indoor sculpture.

Context and Initial Thoughts

From top to bottom:
Arbutus menziesii illustration, courtesy of Southwest School of Botanical Medicine's fabulous resource.
Bead/Flow, installation by the artist at Port Angeles Fine Art Center, Washington.
Pomegranate detail of bronze frame sculpture at Aereoporto Galileo Galilei, Pisa, Italy.
Ilex pollen grain illustration by the artist.
Stair and railing detail of Magnolia library 34th street entrance.

Beginning

Children waiting for the opening of the original Magnolia Bluff Station of the Seattle Public Library. The window, the anticipation, the treasures inside.

Catch + Release

The Magnolia Public Library opened this weekend, and featured Catch + Release, a new pair of sculptures that inhabit spaces in and out of the newly constructed meeting room addition by SHKS Architects.

Designed to connect interior and exterior spaces by relating to this lovely south-facing window of the library, the works refer both to the madrona tree around which the original library and landscape architecture was conceived and to the function of the library as disseminator and patrons as collectors of information.

The work is made of steel and hand-cast polyurethane resin.

Branch with Berries

Magnolia Library Artwork

Catch + Release is a pair of site-specific sculptures created for the Magnolia Library: a branch suspended from the ceiling of the meeting room above the south window and a basket outside the south window. The pieces connect interior to exterior, recall the landscape history of the Magnolia Library site and allude to the function of the library and the patrons who use it.

The interior branch is woven of blackened annealed steel wire using a basket technique, and studded with large, handmade red and orange polyurethane resin beads. This structure hangs from the ceiling at an angle that is visible from the main part of the library, gesturing toward the south window. This window forms a connection to the exterior basket, which is located just outside. Constructed of stainless steel, additional cast resin beads are suspended on the basket’s vertical ribs. Light and shadow also link the two sculptures: the branch is lit from a high angle toward the south wall, broadcasting shadowy lines from the wire and ghostly color from the resin, while the basket is lit from below, illuminating the “berries” and reflecting off the basket in the dark.

The madrona tree around which the original building and landscape architecture was designed provides the conceptual framework for Catch + Release. The suspended branch and its resin beads mimic the mature fruiting arbutus, and invite nature inside the building; outside, the basket captures additional berries. The title Catch + Release refers to these actions of fruiting and gathering, paired activities of nature and humans that work as a metaphor for the relationship between library as information provider and patrons as collectors and disseminators.

Leafboat Benches at Hiawatha Artists Lofts

These resin and steel benches can be seen at the Hiawatha Artists' Lofts on Charles Street, just a block to the east of Rainier Avenue South. The seats suggest leaf boats made by children to float down streams, relating to the bioswale/raingarden they flank. The leaves are both archetypical shapes and specific to the site: Scarlet Oak, Vine Maple and Serviceberry. This project was sponsored jointly by Artspace and a Seattle Department of Neighborhoods Grant.

Pollen

Redmond Elementary School, Redmond, WA

Tools for Creativity

Quarter Century Edition of The Paradise of Childhood A Practical Guide to Kindergartners By Edward Wiebé, Henry Wolcott Blake

Amazing writing, turn of the century, on early childhood learning and creativity, with illustrations. This work is based on Freidrich Froebel's vision for education of young children, in which " The kindergarten was essentially tri-partite:

• toys for sedentary creative play (these Froebel called gifts and occupations)
• games and dances for healthy activity
• observing and nurturing plants in a garden for stimulating awareness of the natural world

It was a search for metaphysical unity, in which the potential growth to wholeness of the individual child within the natural world would fulfill an harmonious ideal... " Peter Weston in The Froebel Educational Institute: the Origins and History of the College, found reprinted at http://www.froebelweb.org/.

See a beautiful collection of the Twenty Gifts promoted by Froebel at The Institute for Figuring and think about how those transcend their use for children into sculptural forms that stand on their own.

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.