<< Back 7/24/02 Collaboration leads to unique exhibit By Michael Beadle It’s no secret there’s an incredible host of talent working in the Haywood Community College Production and Crafts department. For years, the program has produced many of the region’s finest potters, woodcarvers, fiber artists, jewelers, furniture makers, sculptors and other craft artists. Production and Crafts is known not only for its arts instruction, but also for its ability to give artists the business savvy so they can become successful at selling their work. For years, Journel Thomas, a woodcarver and woodturner, had been working with these artists at HCC, and about two years ago, he thought about putting together a collaborative project involving current students, instructors, alumni and friends associated with the program. After meeting with various artists, Thomas and 18 of his friends (a mix of fiber, clay and jewelry artists, furniture makers, woodturners and metal sculptors) decided to join together in an experiment. The plan was for each artist to come up with a piece of artwork using a bowl or platter. Each artist could do anything that came to mind — “the sky’s the limit,” they were told. Thomas provided suggestions and technical advice with each artist working in various disciplines. A year later, the work is near completion for a fascinating gallery exhibit that will open at the Grovewood Gallery in Asheville on Friday, Aug. 2. Since the project brought together a clever mix of talents and a fun dose of camaraderie, the artists agreed to call the exhibit, “Conversations.” The talent represented by the artists in this show is as good as any you’ll find, Thomas said. In addition to current and former HCC Production and Crafts students from the Western North Carolina region, one of the artists, Yutaka Hashimoto, now lives in Japan, so it’s truly an international collaboration. “Conversations” really stretched the artists’ perspectives of what a piece could be, according to several involved with the show. “I enjoy when you get that cross-pollination of disciplines,” Thomas said. “There’s an adrenaline high that comes from designing and putting a piece together. For most artists, you need that in your life.” Journel Thomas’ wife, Caryl Brt, will have a sconce (a decorative wall light) in the show. Brt’s wood piece came partly from the wood of a dead pine tree and partly from the wood of a huge holly tree felled in a heavy snowstorm. Just as Brt and Thomas have worked together for years building furniture, organic gardening and carving out a fulfilling life with each other at their White Oak home, the two were able to combine their talents for Brt’s piece, which used a special technique of soaking wood in oil to give the wood a translucent glow. For Catharine Ellis, a fiber artist instructor at HCC’s Production and Crafts program, using a bowl to make an art piece turned out to be a challenging process. Ellis was far more experienced with the surfaces of materials in her fabric designs rather than carving objects. So after experimenting with attempts to get cloth to stick to a bowl, she and Thomas finally came up with a potato dextrin paste to cover the bowl in a batik-like, resist-and-dye design. Although rice or corn pastes could have been used, Ellis found that the potato paste worked best to develop just the right cracks and patterns on the bowl’s surface. The result is a splendid piece that Ellis was able to carry over to her silk designs — just one example of how “Conversations” pushed the artist to come up with a new way of creating art. “What it’s done is it’s stretched everyone,” Ellis said. “So we’ve all learned some things.” Metal sculptor Grace Cathey, meanwhile, researched African masks to come up with a matriarch’s head mask made out of stainless steel, woven wire and a poplar bowl. The piece has amber and brown colors to signify earthy Mother Earth tones. The face is long and silvery with lots of textures and ridges as the earth has many textures. The mask, Cathey said, is not a duplication of any one traditional African mask but rather an interpretation of many different masks she has come across. “With Journel’s knowledge and enthusiasm, I felt like I could pull it off,” Cathey said. “I think it’s the beginning of a series of shows.” Thomas and HCC woodworking instructor Wayne Raab assembed a piece with four parts and called it, “The Balancing Act.” Raab’s wife, Belinda, is doing the color theory part of it, picking out a monochromatic color scheme to give an almost irridescent feel to it. The bottom bowl piece and long, vase-like stem are both made of poplar, while the next to the top piece is maple, which is topped by a cherry bowl. The top bowl can be tilted and turned at a slant. This design originally came to Raab April 9, 1993, while he was waiting for his first grandchild to be born. He scribbled down a design for a candleholder. Then later, when Thomas was inviting artist friends in the collaboration project, Raab resurrected the drawing and decided to merge ideas inspired by two of his favorite artists, British potter Hans Coper and New York woodworker Wendell Castle. The final piece, which stands about waist-high, has a duel look of hand-turned pottery and wood-carving. “The process of assembling is much more important than the materials,” Raab said. Using off-center wood-turning, Raab added grooves and loops into the texture of the wood. The process of creation wasn’t always a smooth flow from inspiration to production. Terri Cadman, a woodworker, has been working on her “Conversations” piece with a mix of frustration and delight. “I want more control than what it’s giving me,” she said, laughing. Cadman usually takes her designs from nature and has always had functional art pieces. “I’ve never worked with bowls.” So the process of creating a piece using a bowl design makes for some awkward experiments. Artists, it seems, just like your average, ordinary people, find it just as troubling to go through that stumbling stage of not knowing how to do something, only that knowing through trial and error something will finally work itself out. The artists involved in the “Conversations” exhibit are Journel Thomas, Barb Bewernitz, Caryl Brt, Terri Cadman, Grace Cathey, Gary Clontz, Sammy Fong, Tyler Gardner, Will Giannotti, Robert Gibson, Arch Gregory, Bibi Harris, Yutaka Hashimoto, Marilyn MacEwen, Sarah McCrea, Catharine Ellis, Wayne and Belinda Raab, Cori Saraceni, Brian Wurst and Liz Spear. “Conversations” will be on display at the Grovewood Gallery in Asheville from Aug. 2 to Sept. 30, with an opening reception from 2-6 p.m., Friday, Aug. 2. For more information, call the Grovewood Gallery in Asheville at 828.253.7651 or email grovewood@grovewood.com.