State of Craft

State of Craft

The Artisans Speak

by Arlene Distler

Intrigued by the beautiful objects on display at the Bennington  Museum’s State of Craft show, I set out to visit the makers of those objects on their home turf—their studios.

State of Craft

The Artisans Speak

by Arlene Distler

Intrigued by the beautiful objects on display at the Bennington  Museum’s State of Craft show, I set out to visit the makers of those objects on their home turf—their studios.

I head first to Marlboro, a small town about 8 miles west of Brattleboro that has a concentration of erudite and creative types out of proportion to its size, due mainly to the presence of liberal arts Marlboro College. I arrive at the workshop of Michelle and David Holzapfel and Applewoods studio.

For this couple, involved in their craft since the 70s, it’s all about wood—native hardwoods, to be exact. “We use all local wood,” David explains. “We have a great working relationship with local loggers. I buy whole trees, and they give us what they can’t use because it is too large in diameter for the lumber mill or because it might have metal in it that would damage their machinery.” He and Michelle pointed out one particular slab that had bullet holes. Another had stains from maple syrup taps. They take advantage of such “impurities,” says David, to give character to their pieces. “It’s part of the tree’s life.” David’s work uses a reductive technique––lengthwise slabs of tree are cut using a two-person 6-foot long saw. These pieces often end up as tabletops, but, says David, “People who buy my furniture recognize it’s not just something to hold up a plate.”

The slabs dry for a minimum of five years, stacked in a barn near the house. In one corner of the barn is a large collection of drying burls (knot-like outgrowths on trees) the basis for much of Michelle Holzapfel’s work. Michelle’s pieces are quirky but beautifully rendered sculptures which she uncovers, “like archeology,” going into the burls first with a lathe, then with carving tools. Some of her sculptures are wry statements on “women’s work,” such as the Bennington show’s “Baby Blocks,” which replicates in wood the sewing of a quilt with an ingenious combination of artifact (hoop, needle, thimble) and sculpted wood. “These are forms I’ve had in my hands since I was a girl growing up in a large traditional household in a very rural area. We were expected to know how to do things.” Holzapfel says the pieces convey a tension between the ephemeral nature of women’s work and the longevity of art inherent in the more male art world.

The Applewoods store is a sun-filled showplace where David’s elegant furniture is set off by Michelle’s sculptures and vice-versa. Seeing their work displayed together, I just had to ask if they ever collaborate. Said Michelle, “We comment on each other’s work while it’s in progress—but only when our opinion is solicited!”

After being plied with the overflow of their bumper zucchini crop, I leave to my minutes-away next destination.

Malcolm Wright, who started the ceramics program at Marlboro College, lives in a magical kingdom of fire and earth, nestled in the hills of this small college town. Set among mowed fields and fruit trees is a structure that houses a multi-chambered kiln, where Wright’s work is fired the old-fashioned way—with wood. A lot of it. Wright has the numbers memorized: “15-20 sticks of wood every 3-5 minutes for twelve hours to bring it up to firing temperature. Two people take three-hour shifts over 30 hours for a firing.” Add to that the fact that a wood firing is chancy —how the fire rages and plays over the forms determines much about the final appearance of the glaze and even whether a piece survives the process intact—it is easy to understand why there are not more such kilns around. “There’s a lot of grief! Pots get ruined,” says Wright with a hard-won stoicism. “Some people call it more a religion than a technique!”

Wright’s work has an enormous range, from classic pots that are strongly influenced by the forms and glazes of Japanese pottery to abstract sculptures, a relatively recent turn in Wright’s work that is getting attention—and getting into museums and galleries.

Currently, Wright is making bowls of the same brick clay he has been using for sculpture, stacking them in the kiln upside-down as his Japanese teacher, Takashi, with whom he has worked closely, has always done. “I have no clear idea what will happen on the inside of the bowl.” This “letting go” seems to be both a challenge and a delight for Wright. The Bennington Museum has chosen to display Wright’s bowls upside down as if sculptures, a further blurring of the line between art and craft.

Michael Boylen is a close friend of Malcolm Wright’s and replaced him as director of the ceramics program at Marlboro College thirty years ago. As we talk in the living room of his home, perched on a hill overlooking the hamlet of Marlboro, Boylen is in a thoughtful and introspective mood.

I found myself staring at a high shelf that goes the length of Boylen’s living room and holds an assortment of pieces—works by students and friends, his own pots, and pots from Mexico and the Southwest. But holding down one end are two large unidentifiable objects. Blending in with the clay pots, they are in fact mummified pumpkins. With a grin, Boylen explains: “It was cold in the clay studio. These pumpkins were models. They sat on the floor, and over time they froze and dried.” He laughs, “It’s warmer in there now; they’ve got better heat.” Gourds, vegetables, other pots—all get studied and used as ways to know and practice forms. “In order to have output, you need input,” observes Boylen. “There is a distorted notion that things spring of themselves from an inner source. It’s usually not that way.”

Though Boylen has concentrated on ceramics for many years now, he is represented in the State of Craft show by a blown glass piece from the sixties. A small vase, it sits next to another small vase, this one by Dominick Lubino, also a primary force in developing the studio glass movement in this country and a mentor to Boylen. The pairing pleases Boylen; he notes that Lubino’s experiments with glass composition influenced his own work. In fact, he notes, the blue of the vase on exhibit was the result of a glass marble of a particular composition that Lubino presented to him. I first meet Mary Angus as she is headed for the garden plot next to the Readsboro studio and living quarters she shares with Bill LeQuier. In 1983 the two bought a warehouse on the main street of this sleepy town in the southern reach of the Green Mountains from the owners of “The Chair Shop” as townspeople called the one big manufacturing business in town. “The Chair Shop” built tables and other furniture that was sold to many businesses throughout the area.

But after surviving for over 100 years, the Chair Shop fell on hard times, and Angus and LeQuier bought their building at auction with only ten minutes to check it out. “We didn’t know what we were getting into,” said Mary. And while renovation has been an on-going project, life has worked out very nicely for the enterprising couple. They have raised a daughter in the mountain town and maintained a successful craft business. “We live in this beautiful spot, and as long as UPS can find us, we’re okay,” they say.) Mail orders come from their web site and “The Artful Home” catalog, which features many Vermont crafts people. They also have two open studios a year. “People enjoy the adventure of coming out here. They like that we’re off the beaten track,” says LeQuier.

Of course, the fact that the couple’s glasswork is of high quality and highly original—something people want to beat a track to—is a critical detail they modestly omit.

The beautiful “Spiral Gyre,” made from plate glass that is laminated, turned or carved and then sandblasted, represents Bill LeQuier’s recent work in State of Craft. The glass has an intrinsic aqua tint. The basic design is laid out as a profile with strips of self-adhering rubber. LeQuier is interested in movement and emotion, but literally draws inspiration from “how cartoonists can create movement with just a few strokes of a pen.”

Mary creates more traditional blown glass pieces, mainly delicate perfume bottles with subtle coloration. They too are sandblasted, using the resist of rubber strips to create surface design.

Their “bread-and-butter” income depends largely on decorative ornaments—glass candy canes of multi-colored swirls that they sell year-round. The canes are especially popular in England and Australia. This is an area where the two work together. “We’re partners in the production of the canes,” says Bill. “Some people know us just from this.” Sometimes the striped and swirled canes–– there are currently 250 combinations––are incorporated as color elements in Mary’s bottles.

Stained-glass artist Debora Coombs lives about 10 minutes farther down Route 100. The turn-off for her street, Rue Madeleine, is probably ten minutes from North Adams, Mass., where Debora’s husband, Richard Criddle, is director of installations at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MassMoCA), but their house and studio is so hidden away you’d think you were hours from civilization. The modest abode incorporates a light-filled spacious studio that looks out over gardens and meadow. In the studio space are several large flat tables where Coombs can lay her pieces of colored glass that she will fit together with molten lead.

Coombs and her husband, a sculptor, came to the United States from England in 1996. The move was a result of her winning a commission for 20 windows in St. Mary’s Cathedral in Portland, Oregon, awarded through a company in North Adams, Massachusetts.

One of only a handful of stained-glass artists working in the medieval technique of painting directly on colored pieces of glass that are fired multiple times and then fit together, Coombs has won commissions from churches on both sides of the Atlantic, as well as in public spaces such as libraries and hospitals. She will soon have completed the first phase of windows for Saint Henry’s Catholic Church in Nashville, Tennessee. Lush depictions of scenes based on the meditations of the Holy Rosary stand four feet high and are the first phase of a total of forty windows commissioned by the church. Coombs recently completed a 25 foot high stained glass window for Norman Vincent Peale’s Marble Collegiate Church in Manhattan.

Her “self pieces,” or more personal work, have been shown in galleries in London and in this country. The stained-glass piece in the State of Craft show, “Bird in Hand,” is one such piece. It is part of a series Coombs calls Menfolk. Using portraits of men and boys done from life, or photographs that are “arresting,” Coombs says she wants to show the boy in the man, “the bully on the playground,”…and the tenderness that grown men are taught to hide.

“The juxtaposition of images creates its own narrative. By putting images together you create relationship, meaning,” she says. Asked about the appearance of primates in the series, Coombs said they have to do with the way men learn, and perhaps represent for her non-verbal communication. The entire Menfolk series has been shown at the Cochrane Gallery in London.

An important part of Coombs’ relationship with Readsboro is her involvement in the Art Meets gatherings, which focus on a particular aspect of art or craft and draw on the flourishing arts/crafts community. These events, organized by the non-profit Readsboro Arts, have proven popular with local residents and bring in people from the surrounding towns as well.

Heading back via Route 9, a turn onto Augur Hole Road to South Newfane and a short distance to Williamsville and Timson Hill will bring you to the studio of Deidre Scherer, whose work lives firmly on that borderland where art and craft merge.

Bins of fabric, Scherer’s medium, are divided into colors that she then cuts and sews in place with machine stitchery. The result can be remarkably subtle renderings. For the past ten years Scherer’s work has concentrated on the elderly and dying, a subject that she approaches with humility, humanity and life-affirming respect. The ennobling quality of Scherer’s work has been acknowledged with the RISD (Rhode Island School of Design) Alumni Award for Artistic Achievement. The Association singled her out in recognition of “not only the innovative medium of textile she has developed, but also because of her thought-provoking investigations of such subjects as our society’s view of aging, reflections on life and death, family relationships, and the welfare of future generations, and more.” In 2008 Scherer was presented with the American Academy of Hospice and Palliative Medicine Humanitarian Award.

Of her State of Craft piece, “Three Women and a Dog,” Scherer says it is a testament to the artist’s magic: “All three women have meant a lot to me, have been mentors in different ways, but they have never met. I have put them together with my art.

While she doesn’t use landscape as a subject, Scherer credits Vermont with providing her “a means and livelihood.” When I travel I always wonder —after I return—why I left.” When pressed to explain, Scherer states, “People here give you a lot of room to take chances. I haven’t ever felt pressured to go in a more commercial direction.” But she quickly added, “The other side is, you have to make a living.” For Scherer that meant years of high-end craft fairs, which turned out to be an important avenue for her art. “I’d go to Philadelphia, the Smithsonian (in Washington D.C.), San Francisco, Chicago. Over a year, it would bring in enough money to live. But it also is a way to interact with your audience. The exchange is exciting, to see people’s reactions. I can remember things people said that thrilled me.”

Rock River Artists, a group of artists living in fairly close proximity to one another along the River, hold an annual open studio tour that has also been important, says Scherer. “It’s been going for eighteen years and grown into a great experience, and it also helps financially.”

Back in Brattleboro, I make one last stop, at the studio workshop of Daniel Omondi Odhuno.

A furniture maker from Kenya who came to this country as an affiliate with the School for International Training, Omondi has been splitting his time between New Orleans and New York, where he markets his work, and Brattleboro, which he considers his home.

In New Orleans he has been buying salvage wood, mostly cypress, from houses being taken down in the wake of Katrina. People are interested in these pieces, he said, because the wood itself carries a story and has a lot of character, and the pieces are more affordable.

The furniture for which Omondi is most celebrated, however, is often made from mahogany. He uses wood that has been shipped here from his native Africa and also Honduras. He was amazed to find, he said, that the countries of origin ship their best product to the United States–– “the cleanliness, the grain, are far superior to what I can get in Kenya.” He uses cherry maple and walnut, as well, but notes “walnut and mahogany are best for carving. The grain doesn’t split.”

Omondi learned the craft of making furniture and carving traditional tribal elements into it from his father, who had a shop outside of Mombasa. “In Kenya, furniture is often used as dowry. It is a necessity. Here, hand-made furniture is considered more an art. Quality has to be high!”

The way furniture is put together there and here, he says, is the same.” Pegs, dovetails, mortis and tenons– the joinery is the same.” But the carving is Bajun, which comes from the 16th century and is a combination of Arab and Swahili influences. However, says Omondi, it is exciting to learn western designs. “I’m open to it!” For him, being in the museum show, is “like a dream.”

My day of travel showed me that the world of crafts in Vermont is less like a branching tree—with its nourishment going out from a dense center to the fragile edges in decreasing quantity and more like a molecular structure. It is a network of energy points, bonded by connective lines of
creativity, fellowship and love of place. The traveler would do well to plug in and partake of the artistic spirit that is Vermont.