Wood, Mud and Scraps in Eco-Art Today

          

William Alburger, Forest, 2013, 65″ x 108″ x 9″  rescued spalted birch, in an solo exhibition at GRACE


      Eco-friendly art is meeting the world of high art, if we’re to take a cue from what’s showing at local art centers and galleries.  It can be stated that the earliest environmental art started with the artists’ visions and applied those visions to the environment, with little interest in sustainability.

       Quite the opposite trend is developing now.  Several emerging  artists, the “environmental artists” of the 21st century put nature in the center–not the artist or the idea.  Nature is the subject and the artist is nature’s follower. The following artists’ creations are about the land and earth; other artists interested in the environment have been more concerned with a world under the sea.
 

William Alburger, Non-traditional Backwards
One-Door, 2012, 
27″ x. 13.5″ x 5.25
reclaimed Pennsylvania barn wood, specialty
glass and fabric

       William Alburger  lives in rural Pennsylvania, where he picks up scraps of wood from fallen trees and mixes them with discarded barn doors.  He is a passionate conservationist with an addiction to collecting what otherwise would be burned, decayed or discarded in landfills. Largely self-taught, Alburger formerly worked as a painting contractor. His art is both pictorial and practical.  Some sculptures almost look like two-dimensional works, while others function as shelves or furniture.  Hidden doors, cubbyholes and cabinets create surprises, making the natural world his starting point for expression.  Intrusions of man-made items are minor. The knots, whirls, colors and textures of wood speak for themselves, revealing rustic beauty.

William Alburger, Synapse, 2013,
 65″ x 23″ x 5.25″  rescued spalted
poplar and Pennsylvania barn wood


   

Currently the Greater Reston Area Arts Center (GRACE) is hosting a solo exhibition of Alburger’s works.  In Synapse, Alburger cut into the interesting grain and patterns of fallen poplar. He framed top and bottom with old barn wood and reconfigured the form to suggest the space where two forms meet and form connection.  Allburger finds what is already there in nature, but, through presentation, teaches us how to see it in a new way.  Otherwise, we might not notice what nature can evoke and teach us.

Pam Rogers,  Tertiary Education, 2012, handmade
soil, mineral and plant pigments, ink, watercolor 
and graphite on paper.  Courtesy Greater
Reston Area Art Association

       Dedication to the natural world is second nature to Pam Rogers, whose day job is as an illustrator in the Natural History Museum of the Smithsonian Institution.  “I’m inclined to see environment as shaping all of us,” Rogers explains, noting the importance of where we come from, and how our natural surroundings mark our stories and connections.  While drawing natural specimens, she sees as much beauty in decay is as in birth, growth and development.  We’re reminded that everything that comes alive, by nature or made by man, will turn to dust.  Rogers’ drawings combine plants, animals and occasional pieces of hardware.  Some of the pigments spring from nature, the red soil of North Georgia and plant pigments.

      As in Alburger’s Synapse, above, Rogers seeks to form connections between man and the environment. She inserts nails and other links into the drawings from nature for this purpose, as in Stolen Mythology, below. At the moment, Pam Rogers’ art is in the show, {Agri Interior} in the Wyatt Gallery at the Arlington Arts Center. One of her paintings is now in a group exhibition, Strictly Painting, at McLean Project for the Arts.  

Pam Rogers, Stolen Mythology, 2009 mixed media

      Rogers mixes traditional art techniques with abstraction, natural with man-made, sticks and strings, and does both delicate two-dimensional works and vigorous three-dimensional art.   Her sculptures and installations explore some of the same themes.  At the end of last year, she had an exhibition at GRACE called Cairns.  Cairns refer to a Gaelic term to describe a man-made pile of stones that function as markers.  Her work, whether two-dimensional or three-dimensional, is also about the markers signifying the connections in her journey.

Pam Rogers, SCAD Installation (detail), plants, wire, metal fabric, 2009

         “There are landmarks and guides that permeate my continuing journey and my exploration of the relationship between people, plants and place.  I continually try to weave the strings of agriculture, myth and magic, healing and hurting.”  Several of her paintings have titles referring to myths, including Stolen Mythology, above, and another one called Potomac Myths.  Originally from Colorado, Rogers also lived in Massachusetts and studied in Savannah for her Masters in Fine Art.  It’s not surprising that, in college, she had a double major in Anthropology and Art History.

Henrique Oliveira, Bololô, Wood, hardware, pigment
Site-specific installation, National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution
Photograph by Franko Khoury, National Museum of African Art

         Artists cite the spiritual and mythic connection we have to environment.  As a student, Brazilian artist Henrique Oliveira noted the beauty of wood fences which screened construction sites in São Paolo.  Observing these strips being taken down, he collected them and re-used the weathered, deteriorating sheets of woods for some of his most interesting  sculpture.  Oliveira was asked to do an installation in dialogue with Sandile Zulu for the Museum of African Art in Washington, DC.  His project, Bololô, refers to a Brazilian term for life’s twists and tangles, bololô. The weathered strips can act like strokes of the paint brush, with organic and painterly expression, reaching from ceiling to wall and around a pole but usually not touching the ground.   Oliveira’s installation is a reflection of the difficulty in staying grounded in life, in this tangle of confusion.

Danielle Riede, Tropical Ring, 2012, temporary installation in the Museum of Merida, Mexico
photo courtesy of artist

       Environmental concerns played a part in the collaboration of Colombian artist Alberto Baraya and Danielle Riede, at the Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art, shown in 2011. Expedition Bogotá-Indianapolis was “an examination of the aesthetics of place and its plants” in central Indiana.  For two years, the artists collected artificial plants from second-hand stores, yard sales and neighborhoods in around Indianapolis.  Last year Riede did an installation for the City Museum of Merida, Mexico, Tropical Ring.  It’s made of artificial plants garnered from second-hand crafts in from Indiana and Mexico. The plants were cut and reconfigured to evoke the pattern of an ecosystem, indoors.  Currently, the artist is looking for a community partner to participate in Sustainable Growths, an art installation of crafts and other re-used objects destined for abandoned homes in Indianapolis.
      

Danielle Riede, My Favorite Colors, 2006, photo courtesy
http://www.jardin-eco-culture.com/

        Originally, Riede’s primary medium was discarded paint, which she gathered from the unused waste of other artists or the pealing pigments of dilapidated structures.  My Favorite Colors, right, follows several paths of recycled paint along the wall of the Regional Museum of Contemporary art Serignan, France. Beauty comes from the color, light, pattern, and even from the shadows cast on walls to deliberate effect. The memory landscape is uniquely described in the eco-jardin-culture website.  The installation is permanent, although much of what we consider environmental art is temporary.

Sustainable Growths: Painting with Recycled Materials is Riede’s
project to bring meaning to abandoned homes in Indianapolis. Artist’s photo

      Fallen trees, branches and other wastes of nature are tools of drawing to artist R L Croft.  Some artists feel they have no choice but to re-use and re-claim discarded goods or fallen debris, as many folk artists and untrained artists have always been doing. The need to draw or create is innate and a constant in one’s identity as an artist, but it’s not easy to get commissions, jobs or sell art. Art materials are very expensive, so there is a practical objective to using environmental objects which do not need to be stored.

R L Croft, Portal, 2011, Oregon Inlet, North Carolina

To Croft, using the environment is a means of drawing, but on a very large scale.  His outdoor, impromptu drawings-in-the-wild are images grounded in his style of painting and sculpture Croft has made a number of sculptures called “portals” and/or “fences,” most of which have been carried away by rising tides or decay.  He makes these assemblages out of debris found along the beaches, particularly those of the Outer Banks, in North Carolina.  Portal at Oregon Inlet, NC, left, was constructed of found lumber, nails, driftwood, plastic, rope, bottles, netting, etc. 

Environmentalism is not the primary content of his art. Croft says: “Making art for the purpose of being an environmentalist doesn’t interest me. Making art whose process is environmentally friendly does interest me.”  He works in rivers, woods and on beaches.  In the aftermath of one natural disaster, Hurricane Irene, he brought meaning to the incident–both personal and anthropological. 

R.L. Croft, Shipwreck Irene, in Rocky Mount, N.C. Built in October, 2012, it’s still there but
 less recognizable as a ship form.  The location is in Battle Park 
off of Falls Road near the Route 64 overpass. Photo courtesy of artist.

      Croft made Shipwreck Irene in Rocky Mountain, NC, when the Maria V. Howard Art Center held a sculpture competition and allowed him the use of fallen debris after Hurricane Irene, which left as much physical devastation as his sculptures allude to metaphorically.  The shipwreck is a very old icon in the history of art, usually associated with 17th century Dutch seascapes.  But to Croft, who in childhood found healing in the Outer Banks after the death of his mother, the meaning is deep. The area known as the “Graveyard of the Atlantic” fed his early sense of adventure and aesthetic appreciation for texture, decay and the abrasive effects of wind, sand and water. 
       Hurricane Irene “is much like the resilient community frequently raked over by severe hurricanes, yet plunging forward.  The current art center is world class and it is the replacement for an earlier one destroyed when still new. ” Croft said. Shipwreck Irene is still there, but decay renders it increasingly unrecognizable as a ship form.  The temporary aspect is expected.  “People of the region know grit and impermanence,” the artist explained. “I’m told that Shipwreck Irene became a habitat for small animals and small birds but that is a happy accident.”

R L Croft, Sower, 2013, 22 x 14 courtesy artist

        Croft has also said:  “Nothing can be taken for granted. Constant change proves to be the only reliable point of reference. Equilibrium being as fleeting as life itself, one fuses an array of thought fragments retrieved from memories into a drawing of graphite, metal or wood. By doing so, the artist builds a fragile mental world of metaphor that lends meaning to his largely unnoticed visit among the general population.”   Croft did an installation in the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, a drawing in the wild entitled Sower, in homage to Van Gogh   He worked in wattle to make a large drawing that, in a metaphorical, abstracted way, resembles a striding farmer sowing his seed.  The farmer is the winged maple seed and it references Vincent’s wonderful ink line drawings.

        Nature has been the subject of art by definition and a curiosity about the natural world has defined a majority of artists since the Renaissance.  The first wave of Environmental Artists applied their vision to the environment by directly making changes to the environment–permanent (Robert Smithson, James Turrell) or temporary (Christo and Jeanne-Claude)  Turrell ,whose most famous work is the Roden Crator in Arizona, is the subject of a major retrospective now in New York, at the Guggenheim.

        It is one thing for art to alter the environment, as the earliest environmental artists did. It is another thing to make art to call attention to the problems of waste and depletion of the earth’s resources. Yet, it’s an even stronger statement when professional artists exclusively make art that re-uses discarded items and turns them into art.  Environmental Art today addresses waste reduction and stands up against the problems caused by environmental damage to our rapidly changing world.  Designers are getting into this process, as explained in the previous blog. For example, Nani Marquina and Ariadna Miguel design and sell a rug made of discarded bicycle tubes, Bicicleta.
         In the future, I hope to blog on how artists address sustainable agriculture.  Currently, the main exhibition at Arlington Arts Center, Green Acres: Artists Farming Fields, Greenhouses and Abandoned Lots.


Copyright Julie Schauer 2010-2016

Visualizing Nature and its Sea of Changes: Where Art and Science Meet

The Hyperbolic Coral Reef project has spread around the globe

Nature is mysterious and some of the magical colors and patterns of the coral reef are a wonder of nature’s artistry. Surprisingly, vegetables such as kale, frissée and other lettuces mimic the free-flowing, wild patterns found in the coral reef.  These products of nature form hyperbolic planes, not explained by Euclidean Geometry. 

Crochet, a fiber art that traditionally has utilitarian purpose, holds the power to make this mystery visible to our eyes.  With this in mind, various hyperbolic coral reef projects have sprung up around the globe, bringing together crochet artists to call attention to the fact that this natural wonder — something akin to the oceans’ natural forest — is vastly disappearing as a result of pollution, human waste and climate change.

Photo of satellite reef, Föhr, Germany, courtesy Uta Lenk


The Hyperbolic Coral Reef Project is the brainstorm of Margaret and Christine Wertheim, who founded the Institute for Figuring in Los Angeles to highlight this phenomenon. They based their idea on the discovery of a mathematician at Cornell University, Daina Taimina. Taimina used crochet to unlock a mathematical means to explain the parallel nature of crochet lines in 1997, while the Wertheims further developed a repetoire of reef-life forms: loopy “kelps”, fringed “anemones”, crenelated “sea slugs”, and curlicued “corals.”  A simple pattern or algorithm, which has a pure shape can be changed slightly to produce variations and permutations of color and form. The Crochet Reef project began in 2005 and the experiment has involved communities of Reefers, which, like the reef itself, have become worldwide.  The Wertheim sisters come from Australia, where the Great Barrier Reef is located, while Taimina is originally from Latvia.

Photo of Actual Coral Reef, from www.thenowpass.com

These handmade, collaborative works of fiber art have brought together art, science and math to a worldwide community — for the purpose of the sharing a wonder of nature that could be lost. The replica of a coral reef for the Smithsonian Community Reef was a satellite of the Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef Project installed at  the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in  2010-2011.  This project has moved and is on view in the Putnam Museum of History and Natural Science in Davenport, Iowa, where it will remain for 5 years.  A former student, Jennifer Lindsay supervised the installation and the public outreach at the Smithsonian and the Putman and is currently coordinating the Artisphere Yarn Bomb in Arlington, Va.  

Postcard from the coral reef project in Föhr, Germany


This past summer, there was an installation at the Museum Kunst der Westkuste on island of Föhr, in Germany.   Over 700 artists from the island, and the mainland of Germany and Denmark came together and contributed to the largest of over 20 worldwide projects around the world.  At this moment, there is a satellite of the Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef Project at Roanoke College in Salem, Va.  It will remain there at the Olin Gallery until March 1, 2013, reminding students at this Liberal Arts College of the fragility of the coral reef.  


Artist  Elise Richman — who lives on the Puget Sound and teaches at the University of the Puget Sound in Tacoma, Wa — also reminds us that changes are afloat at sea.  Richman has different processes of painting, each of which reflect environmental systems and states of flux.  In the water-based paintings, she applies inks, acrylics and a liquified powder pigment that has been mixed with powder gum arabic. She pours pools of these paints onto thick sheets of watercolor paper, allowing them to expand, evaporate, be absorbed or intermingle, while using minimum control.  


Elise Richman, Each Form Overflows its Present, mixed media on canvas, 2013, photo by Richard Nicol

The poured paint dries into forms that evoke the contours of islands, water bodies, and/or fluid dynamics.  Richman then takes these contours as boundaries that she can transgress in subsequent layers. “I assert my will by deepening the color, adjusting the quality of particular edges and unifying the compositions while maintaining the dynamic sense of flux that the materials activate,” she explains.

More recently, she has used this technique on large-scale canvases.  Her newest water-based paintings, such as Each Form Overflows its Present, I, represent an active state of flux as well as topographical formations.  They comment, through implication, on the threat of accelerated changes humans have induced on the environment.

Elise Richman, Isle I, oil, 12 x 12, 2008 photo by Richard Nicol

Richman also has a body of three-dimensional oil paintings made of organic dots which seem to grown from the canvases.  As one moves around the small, intricately-detailed paintings, the topographies and colors change in visually dynamic ways, maintaining their aesthetic beauty.  These forms represent non-hierarchical environments.  “They evoke tide-pools of miniature islands; intimate marine scapes act as 

Elise Richman, detail of Pool I, 2010, photo by Richard Nicol 

meditations on the processes of painting, an embodiment of time’s passage, and models of the material world’s interconnectedness,” Richman explained.  Each mark, point or dot has its own integrity, yet each is subsumed into a larger whole that has an ethical as well as aesthetic dimension. In short, imbalances of power create exploitations of the natural world and groups of people.  Yet this  largeness of nature can be maintained in works of art that are personal and meditative.  Richman’s website includes works in the encaustic and acrylic paint media.  The encaustics have multiple layers, from which she scrapes to represent geological formations.

Copyright Julie Schauer 2010-2016