Since many of you will not see the exhibit in person, I wanted to share a few of my plans for my upcoming solo show at the Grants Pass Museum of Art in Oregon this April. I also think it’s fun to get a behind the scenes look at what it takes to make an idea come to fruition. It’s been a lot of planning to get to this point, but I think I’ve got it fairly organized and ready to go. The title of the show is ‘where art & nature meet’ and I’ll be showcasing 6 large installations from my Rock Candy, Relic, Hive, Bone, Lichen and Umbel Series. The installations will be shown alongside photos of the work as it was installed in nature. For this show, I wanted to highlight the works as they look in their ‘natural habitat’ while also creating engaging installations in the gallery setting.
Above is a selection of photos of the Rock Candy Series Installation in progress. Nearly 200 rocks were made and glazed, they have holes in the backside so that they can hang on the wall. Then I created a paper template and laid out the rocks to create a Rock Candy Ribbon that will wrap around 3 walls of the gallery, a total of about 18′. In the third photo above, you see blank areas in the paper template, this is where the 12″ x 12″ photos printed on metal of the Rock Candy Series as they were installed in a rock crack at Joshua Tree will hang interspersed with the actual rocks.
Fingers crossed it looks as good as I think it will!!
I want to leave some of these installations as surprises but I will share one more from the Umbel Series. I have 60 out of the original 230 of the Umbel flowers left and I wanted to recreate a path of them in the gallery as I had done for the Art at the Arboretum exhibit. The museum wasn’t keen on the idea of drilling holes in their floors to put the Umbel stems into the floor (surprise surprise!). So, I had square metal bases cut and welded onto 60 of the metal rods- this photo is them piled up in the back of my Subaru hatchback! Now I can position them on the gallery floor to create my path with no holes required – win!win! There will be three large photos printed on metal that will hang on a wall towards the end of the path showing what the installation looked like when it was installed at the UCSC Arboretum.
Ok, that’s all the teasers for now… let me know what you think!