Continuing on the theme of small creatures created from scraps and detritus, here’s a slightly larger creature. It’s currently on display at One Life Church in Evansville as part of an exhibit of artwork inspired by Places.
This piece is 2″ wide and deep but about 6″ tall. Like the previous piece, it has a little propeller that spins. I’ve had fun exhibiting these creatures within glass display cases that add to the appearance that they are collected specimens.
This piece of art doesn’t exist, even though it’s the most recent piece I’ve been working on. With it, I learned that when you’re making art out of found objects, you’d best do your research.
The centerpiece is a beautiful little nest that I found on the ground last fall. I created a mass of glitter and googly eyes to surround it. Someone remarked that the glittery circle was reminiscent of Ezekiel’s vision of a wheel covered in eyes, which I liked. The inspiration for the piece hadn’t been the Bible verse, but I decided to make a reference to the folk song “Ezekiel Saw the Wheel” by titling the piece “Way Up in the Middle of the Air”.
I was about to deliver the piece to a local exhibit when it occurred to me that perhaps birds’ nests are included in the same regulations that forbid anyone from possessing feathers or other parts of wild birds. I looked it up, and they do.
I should have done more research first. I disassembled the piece for now, but you may see it reinvented later–minus the nest.
I’m happy to have had my work accepted into another area show. This time it’s two photographs of children in Patchwork Central’s Arts & Smarts Children’s Program.
Above is “Aliyah”.
The show is called About Face and is at the Ivy Tech Bower-Suhrheinrich Visual Art Center in Evansville. The art will be on display from January 10-February 21.
My “Honeybee” photograph is part of the Ohio Valley Art League’s Nature Photography exhibit that’s on display in the Rotunda Gallery of the Henderson County Public Library in Henderson, Kentucky from now through January 3, 2014.
I went to the opening last night and received the Third Place Award!
I’ve got so many photographs I’ve taken at Patchwork and for my garden blog. I’m glad I decided it’s time to do something more with them.
This photo was taken in the garden at Patchwork. I took a bunch of photos of sunflowers this summer and was intrigued by the way that the florets at the center of the sunflowers open a ring at a time. Then the bee came along at just the right moment.
A couple weeks ago, the sound of the cicadas was deafening. For a piece earlier this summer, I’d felt lucky to have found a single cicada shell, but I decided to look again after having my ears assaulted. This time, I came up with quite a collection.
I’d wanted to make a piece for a local recycled art show, so I used the cicadas as an inspiration, building a kind of mandala from them and some crazy lenticular eyes I’d picked up at the Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore. Throw in some old buttons, wedding confetti I picked off the ground in Germany, old doilies, beads, pins, sequins, and thread, and it’s a writhing dance of empty shells and eyeballs.
This is the third of three Relics that I made recently. This one is made from two beaded tomatillo husks, thread, a thread spool, an old button, and a weird metal hand from somewhere or other.
I collected the tomatillo husks from the ground in my garden. It was interesting to me how much they softened and didn’t break the more I worked with them as I added beads. By the end, they had started to resemble loosely woven fabric, not brittle leaf veins.
Amy Rich 