Story-telling: Part One

Over the years, my hands have explored a brilliant spectrum of surfaces, textures, and forms. They have dove into emotion, action, and reflection. All of it spawning from story.

My first encounter with art-making came to me at 7, fresh out of my last hospital stay with asthma. That day, I went back to my safe place, where I would always wander. With just some metal clips, sticks, glue, and paper, I had my first kinetic sculpture..other-wise known as a windmill. I still have no answer to my parents for where I came up with the idea. Perhaps artists are simply mediums for materials.

 

Recently, my work has found itself discovering a higher intent...that the purpose of art-making is simply to tell a story.

In the world of plaster artistry, I often get calls from clients who are going through an important mark in their life..a birth, a graduation, a desire to have beauty after tragedy. It's always an honor to create. Starting in one room and going to the next. Stroke after stroke, I watch my client's outlook transform.

This year has delighted me with an abundance of opportunities to not only to create beauty in spaces, but also use my skills to illuminate and preserve a family's legacy through glass.

 My client, Ted Lagreid, comes from a rich line of sculptural talent. Either through building the observation tower at Mt. Constitution on Orcas Island or constructing the stone pillars at the Woodland Park Zoo Rose Garden, both his father and grandfather were master stone masons.  Taking the best earthen artifacts and placing these forms and textures for all to enjoy was something that they were driven to do.

In honor of the Lagreid family, I am creating a series of casted glass hearts. This heart shape was generated from a mold I made off of a very precious rock from one of the pillars at the Woodland Park Zoo Rose Garden, another sacred site from my client's ancestry.

As I continue to use my own hands and skills to transform and capture this history, I realize I am beginning to tell my own personal narrative about the importance of texture in our lives.

As time passes, technology quickens its pace. Objects and processes continue to be faster and smoother. If the towers and pillars that the Lagreids constructed nearly a century ago would have been built today, they would probably be erected in record time...but would they have been sculpted with the same amount of love, care, and patience?

....Here's to the blessing and gift to tell story through texture!