The Art of Materials

This exhibition brings together artists who are working with paper, fabric, industrial felt, metal, steel, cement, clay, plastic, cork and wood. Some of the artists combine disparate materials that embody imaginative content or reuse materials that create symbolic forms. Others opt for a single material that gives full voice to their artistic expression. The Art of Materials exhibition has two major questions which are the central topic of consideration: why an artist chooses the material used in their artwork and how the selection of that material reflects what the artist wants to say.

Many thanks to the curators Vicky Kumpfer and Lisa Lightman for putting together this exhibition. I am honored to be a part of it.

Opening Reception is Thursday, May 9, 5:30 - 7:30.

I will be participating on the panel discussion for the Art of Materials exhibit on

Sunday, June 9 from 1 - 2:30

Artist Residency in Eastern Iceland

Off to Iceland last September for a month long artist residency at Skaftfell Center for Visual Art, located on a fjord in the small fishing village of Seydisfjordur. My fifth visit to the island as there is something about the elemental shapes and energies that continue to draw me back to its natural wonders of volcanoes, rift zones and young landscapes visibly being reshaped.

I return to feel its energies and rhythms, to experience its vastness and to open me to possibilities and conversations with and of the landscape.

Conversations with, of and off:

Evidence of the landscape organizing itself—reshaping itself in human time. The eruption site of the Meradalir Volcano on the Reykjanes Peninsula in August of 2022.

Two years ago in December of 2020, Seydisfjordur experienced an average year’s rainfall over a period of 10 days. Major landslides destroyed 13 buildings.

Now, two years later, evidence of the landslides remain.

displacement, dislocation, movement, shaping, change?

A water process that shapes the landscape

During my stay, I experienced a red alert storm with winds up to 60 m per second. Evidence of the power of the winds (below); a historic pier house built around 1900 by a Norwegian entrepreneur was lost, collapsing on itself.

There’s no everything; everything is always moving as the landscape (natural and human—made) interacts with the natural processes of wind, water and soil.

Dissolving boundaries between art and nature; merging art and earth natural processes. Video by Brooke Holve & Eve Chartrand created during the artist residency at Skaftfell Center for Visual Art.

Surface Mining

“I think there is no innocent landscape, that doesn’t exist.”

from Anselm Kiefer’s Relics of Violence

It’s already been two months since my return from Cill Rialaig, the artist retreat on the Iveragh Peninsula of County Kerry Ireland.

I went with artist, Catherine Richardson, to collaborate on Materiality, Re_Mined, a project we initiated in response to the call for action proposed in Extraction: Art on the Edge of the Abyss. The event slated for 2021, envisions worldwide participation and simultaneous showing of artists from around the world concerned about how “We are recklessly modifying every feature of the planet surfaces.”

We mostly worked independently guided by our own inspirations and impressions of the place except when we took field trips to mines and quarries in the area.

In those two months since my return, I have been working with some of the materials of Cill Rialaig that I discovered—as it was an unfamiliar source place with its own unique aura seeped in a difficult history with remains and remnants of a time.

My hope was to extract from what was there. What were those materials of this place that spoke to me?

With a predilection toward stones and wind worn landscapes, I was at home surrounded by stones & rocks—the cottages, boundary walls, ruins, standing stones. A spectacularly beautiful place with memories in these stones—trace fossils that marked a past.

If the stones could talk, what would they say?

No words but textures to touch and feel. In preparation for this residency, I extracted pages from mining books. Here I found a place to use them by backing them with wheat paste and using the rock shapes from the wall to mold them. The stone wall shaped the pages and held the art.

Trying to keep warm in a cold place:

At Cill Rialaig, a prefamine village with 19th century ambiance, I was far from the world I knew without the distractions of the 21st century—internet, iPhone, daily news.
Instead I was preoccupied with keeping warm. No central heating, no insulation and cold stone walls & a slate ceiling. The turf eater (an Irish term for the wood stove) became my focus as it consumed the peat, the fuel used here. Discovering that peat was so fast burning, I found that the stove required vigilant attending to ensure uninterrupted warmth.

I went through many bags of peat and accumulated many pails of ash. So it became a material to experiment with in its various forms of brick, charcoal, ash and ink.