The Penland Sketchbook

Focus on: Jessica Calderwood

By Penland on May 10, 2013 in Penland Gallery

The Penland Gallery and Visitors Center proudly presents the second Focus exhibition of the season, a new body of enameled jewelry, sculpture, and mixed-media paintings by Jessica Calderwood. Now on view in the Focus Gallery, the show runs through Sunday, June 16th.

“Entangled (Magnolia Grandiflora),” enamel on copper, ceramic decals, china paint, sterling silver, 10 x 10 x 2 inches

“My most recent series combines flower/botanical forms with fragments of the human body in order to address the narrative of human life cycles: change, growth, metamorphosis, aging, loss. The choice to use flower and plant forms is multi-layered. Flowers have been used throughout history as symbols of the feminine. It can be found in mythology, literature, folklore and visual art. In addition, Western culture has an intricate system of flower symbolism that has been a way for humans to express and communicate complex emotions.

“Garden Variety”, brooch: enamel, copper, ceramic decals, china paint, sterling silver, glass beads, stainless steel

“I created these work to be intentionally humorous and ironic. These human/plant hybrids are large, voluptuous, headless, and sometimes armless. They are intended to portray a spectrum of concepts relating to gender and identity. The Flower People are at once, powerful and powerless, beautiful and absurd, inflated, and amputated.” – Jessica Calderwood

“Overgrown”, mixed-media collage: magazine paper, enamel, copper, ceramic decals, thread, adhesive, glass beads, gouache, graphite on paper, 18 x 12 inches

Jessica Calderwood is an image-maker and sculptor who works primarily in the mediums of metal and enamel, using a combination of traditional and industrial metalworking processes to make statements about contemporary life. Her works are imbued with personal stories and vibrant color. She received her BFA from the Cleveland Institute of Art and her MFA from Arizona State University, with an emphasis in metalworking. Her work has been exhibited throughout the U.S. and internationally. She has participated in artist residencies with the John Michael Kohler Arts/Industry Program and the Mesa Arts Center. Her work has also been published in Metalsmith Magazine, American Craft, NICHE, Ornament, the Lark 500 series, and The Art of Enameling. She has been an Assistant Professor of Art at the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh since 2008. Most recently, Calderwood is a recipient of a Wisconsin Arts Board Fellowship.

“So Square”, mixed-media sculpture: ceramic, paint, enamel, copper, fiberglass, silk flowers, 4 x 2.5 x 2.5 feet

Click here to visit Jessica’s website, where you can see more of her work.
Click here to visit the Penland Gallery website.
Penland’s Focus Gallery is a space primarily dedicated to single-artist exhibitions. Focusing on individual artists over the course of the year, it presents a larger selection of their work to gallery visitors and patrons.
Click here for more information about the Focus Gallery.

Comments { 0 }

Photo of the Week: Caliente Otra Vez!

By Penland on May 9, 2013 in Penland People, Photo of the Week

A Penland Studio Style photo of jeweler and instructor Lola Brooks from Spring Concentration 2011 makes it’s glamorous public return in the pages of Ornament Magazine this month! Click here to check out the preview on Facebook. Or click here to read the full article.

Comments { 0 }

Lola Brooks in Ornament

By Penland on May 9, 2013 in Penland People

“279forgetmeknots” brooch of thirty continuous feet of knotted stainless steel (914.4 centimeters), fourteen karat gold, broken Victorian coral petals, 8.9 centimeters high

Metals instructor Lola Brooks, and her extravagant jewelry, is featured in this month’s Ornament magazine. The article begins,

Lola Brooks is a little intimidating. She is tall and thin, with features that are angular, but delicate. Dark curls frame her pale skin and her eyes are hidden behind oversized rhinestone glasses (one of about a hundred vintage pairs she stores in a mock python-skin-covered suitcase). One arm is covered with tattoos of thorny roses, diamonds, bows, and a heart with a dagger. Her attire is remarkably precise. A natural introvert, she masterfully puts up a cool exterior, honed by two decades spent in New York City. Now she has retreated to the Georgia countryside and “the crust is flaking off.”

Read the whole article here.

Comments { 0 }

Photo of the Week: Bill Thomas Comes Home

By Penland on April 26, 2013 in Classes, Penland People, Photo of the Week

Bill Thomas’s recent workshop at Penland School of Crafts was a sort of homecoming for the woodworker, whose parents, Vern and Shirley Thomas, live in nearby Spruce Pine. “Most of my family is buried in Bandana,” he recalls. “I was born in Spindale, and my father was born near Micaville. He moved out in the early ’40s, looking for work. He moved back the day he retired.” Thomas taught “Building the Fox Canoe,” a class featuring his technique for fabricating a sleek, lightweight canoe from plywood panels and fiberglass, in Penland’s wood studio the week of April 7 – 13. He has been a professional woodworker for over 35 years, designing and building custom projects from cabinetry and furniture to sailboats, powerboats, kayaks and canoes, for a wide range of clients. He lives in southern Maine, where he says the environment reminds him of North Carolina. There’s more information about Bill at billthomaswoodworking.com.

Comments { 0 }

Race into the Retro-Future with Matthew Hebert!

By Penland on April 24, 2013 in Classes

Vehicle #1: Petri Table (for Valentino Braitenberg) is an exploration of what happens when BEAM robotics meet a functional furniture object. It’s a coffee table that houses ten small solar-powered machines that twitch about when exposed to sunlight.

Click here to watch the Petri Table in action!

Pinewood Derby 2.0: A Two-Week, All-Levels Wood and Kinetic Electronics Workshop
May 26 – June 7, 2013

Do you need a reboot? This workshop is a mashup in which the folksy simplicity of the Boy Scouts’ pinewood derby will collide with the techno-sophistication of Arduino micro-controllers. The result will be simple wooden vehicles with potentially complex behaviors. They might be programmed to avoid obstacles, follow a flashlight, or draw interesting shapes on the floor. Technical information and demonstrations will include soldering, coding in the Arduino programming language, and the fundamentals of fabrication in wood.

Created for the exhibition Decoy at the Saskatchewan Craft Council’s Affinity Gallery, Dazzle Duck embodies a continuing exploration of three-dimensional scanning, direct manufacturing, and micro-controllers.

Click here to see Dazzle Duck in action!

Pinewood Derby 2.0 will introduce students to the amazing potential of integrating micro-controllers into physical objects. All students will begin by assembling Sparkfun’s ProtoSnap – Minibot. This kit includes everything you need to program an Arduino micro-controller and use it to control two motors in response to light sensors and other inputs. Assembling this kit will introduce the basics of soldering, assembling mechanical components, and programming in the Arduino environment. Once we have completed the stock kits, we will begin to customize our vehicles using the tools in the wood studio to create chassis, wheels, and other components. We will learn to customize both the physical arrangement of the vehicles, while also changing their programming allowing them to move over different terrain and respond to different variables in the environment. The course will culminate in a race through the woodworking studio. Suggested reading for the course: Valentino Braitenberg’s Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychology, Massimo Banzi’s Getting Started with Arduino, and Arduino.cc‘s Learning and Reference pages.

Matthew Hebert creates work that deals with technology and its effects on the environment and our sense of place, taking recognizable furniture forms and layering new forms of use and meaning onto them. He received his Bachelor of Arts in Architecture from the University of California-Berkeley and his Master of Fine Arts at California College of the Arts. He has taught at several schools including the University of Wisconsin – Madison, CalArts, and The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and is currently Assistant Professor of Furniture at San Diego State University. Matthew Hebert has been working under the studio name eleet warez since the mid-90s. His work has been exhibited in venues including The Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, The Berkeley Art Museum, The Milwaukee Art Museum, The Museum of Craft and Folk Art in San Francisco, The California Center for the Arts, The Chicago Cultural Center, and Core77 in New York. Additionally, he is a member of the collaborative public art team Unmanned Minerals, with Reno-based poet Jared Stanley and Los Angeles-based artist Gabie Strong.

You can click here to visit Matthew’s website, where you can see more of his work, including videos of ambulatory wooden sculptures like The Lawnmonster.

And you can click here to read Man in the Machines, a profile of Matthew Hebert by Kinsee Morlan for KCET San Diego.

Binary Drawers are a pair of interconnected drawers exploring ideas of negotiation and compromise through furniture. Closing the open drawer of one table opens the drawer of the other. The hydraulic link between the two drawers leaves no way for both to be closed at the same time.

Interested? Click here for more information about this and Penland’s other summer workshops in wood.

♫ Penland summer! Here it comes! Oh, oh, oh! ♫

Comments { 0 }

Photo of the Week: Looking Down by Dan Bailey

By Penland on April 19, 2013 in Events, Photo of the Week

This is Gene Ayscue and Dan Bailey finishing up the installation, in the Penland Gallery lobby, of Dan’s incredible piece called Looking Down: Penland School of Crafts. The piece was constructed from over 15,000 photos taken in July, August, and October 2012 from a tethered balloon. They have been collaged by hand and placed onto the background satellite image to form a chronicle of human activity on the Penland School campus. Magnifying glasses will be available for visitors. This piece is part of the 0 to 60 project, which is a collaboration between Penland School and the North Carolina Museum of Art.

This is Dan’s piece as it appears on the Gigapan website, where you can scroll around and zoom way in and see all of the activity recorded in the collage. It includes bits from July 4, from the auction, a few sequences of groups of people walking through the landscape, people playing with the balloon shadow, and other delights. Click here and say goodbye to the next half-hour.

Comments { 0 }

0 to 60: The Experience of Time through Contemporary Art

By Penland on April 18, 2013 in Events

Alison Collins lining the Dye Shed with muslin and Proust.

Penland School will have two events this weekend marking the opening of a group of four art installations on the Penland campus. The installations are the work of Dan Bailey, Alison Collins, Kyoung Ae Cho, and Anne Lemanski, and they are part of a project called 0 to 60: The Experience of Time through Contemporary Art, which is a collaboration between Penland School and the North Carolina Museum of Art. The opening events will include a evening slide lecture on April 19 and an afternoon walking tour on April 20. The installations will be on view until August 31.

On Friday, April 19, the four artists will each make a short slide presentation about their work. They will be joined by Linda Dougherty, the museum’s chief curator and curator of contemporary art, who will give an overview of the project. This event will take place in the Northlight building at Penland at 8:00 PM. On Saturday, April 20 there will be a walking tour of the four installations beginning at 1:30 PM. Penland’s director, Jean McLaughlin, will make some introductory remarks at the Pines Portico and then each of the four artists will speak when the group visits their installation.

Gene Ayscue and Dan Bailey installing “Looking Down: Penland School of Crafts” in the lobby of the gallery.

Filmmaker, animator, and photographer Dan Bailey has created a two-part work using time-lapse and low-altitude aerial balloon photography. Looking Up is a slow-moving time-lapse video of the sky over Penland. The vantage point is reversed in Looking Down, a large printed wall piece that is a collage of photographs of the campus made over many months using a camera attached to a helium balloon.

Alison Collins working in the Dye Shed.

Alison Collins’s Temps Perdu will fill the Dye Shed, a historic log structure at Penland, with hundreds of yards of muslin and hundreds of muslin leaves. On the yardage is text from Marcel Proust’s novel In Search of Lost Time. On the leaves are words that refer the things the artist herself has lost. The text is written using a dye Alison made from the rust that collected under some of her steel sculptures.

Anne Lemanski working on the installation of “Extirpated.”

Anne Lemanski’s Extirpated is about animal species that once inhabited this region but have disappeared with no hope of return. The format of Lemanski’s piece is a series of clotheslines suspended between steel supports based on the contour of Kentucky long rifles. Hanging from the lines will be silhouette images of species that have disappeared from Mitchell County.

Kyoung Ae Cho installing “Shining Ground” on the Northlight porch.

Kyoung Ae Cho’s Shining Ground, memorializes her discovery of mica the first time she visited Penland in 2000. The piece incorporates mica collected from the banks of the Toe River into vertical panels made of cloth, pins, and wood, which will be installed on the outside of the Northlight building. The piece is her attempt to recapture, many years later, the moment of quiet surprise when she first saw the ground covered with the sheen of mica sand.

“Process” by Penland resident artist Tom Shields is part of the exhibition at the North Carolina Museum of Art.

The other component of the 0 to 60 project is a major exhibition at the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh. The exhibition, which is open now and runs through August 11, includes work by the four installation artists along with twenty-eight other artists, many of whom have connections to Penland. This exhibition engages the viewer in an experiential and conceptual journey through time, looking at how time can be used as form, content, and material, and how art is used to represent, evoke, manipulate, or transform time. The exhibition will continue through August 11.

Here’s an ongoing album of pictures from the project.

Comments { 0 }