Tuesday, October 5, 2010

Moving back into home studio

In mid-August I moved back into my home studio to begin work on an installation in Zephyr Gallery for April 2011. My fellow artist friend, Todd Smith, and I have decided to do a collaborative installation on a sort of post-apocalypic flooding of the Ohio River and the resulting habitat for the remaining humans. Our plan is to use the natural flood line of the building to construct an atmosphere in the bottom of the gallery that is a flooded Ohio River with floating sculptural pieces and strata. The upstairs of the gallery would be transformed into the canopy where human size nests will be created from both natural and left over man-made debris. This is difficult for me to fully explain in writing because sometimes I think so visually that translating what I do in the English language can be difficult for me. Hopefully as I begin to document the process and post more blog pages about it, it will become more clear.
These are strips of cotton dyed muslin hanging on my clothes line to dry and later be tied to 1"x2"x8' wood strips for installation.
Because I need most of my studio for the installation, I've had to begin a new process of organization for my materials. Like other installation artists, I can not survive on creating installation art alone. I also create smaller works and teach, so I've got to have a studio that can accomodate my various needs. Very Challenging. And the picture above represents how condensed I've started to become with my supplies.
As you can probably see from this photo, my studio is inside of a garage that also has to hold sculptures and costumes from past shows as well as a bike and a lawn mower.

This is my first attempt at laying out the installation I began in my studio at the Kentucky Museum of Art and Craft. I'm sure this will change many more times over the next few posts as my process moves forward.