City Folk and Country Style Eggs

When Charlet Davenport first saw my work she responded to the urban themes and invited me to bring the city to the country for Sculpture Fest 2002.

I think art in the landscape needs to enhance the experience of perceiving a place. The challenge for me was to create new work that would be consistent with my own interests and themes, and which would fit with the Davenport setting. Ideally the work should increase the pleasure of visiting the land as much as viewing the art.

A grove of young maples was a perfect spot for new work in my poster series. These are cut steel drawings based on photographs of people on sidewalks and city benches. I placed them in the woods where light filters through the image and they become a shadow play of the city world.

Other new work in the City Folk theme are the umbrella people. I used a rising hillside of mowed grass like a city plaza, and placed life size figures as if they were walking through on a rainy day, each in a different direction. The privacy and insularity of umbrellas gives each one a separate space, while the setting unites them visually.

I had the most fun placing new work from an ongoing series I call Urban Ornithology. When I find especially beautiful enameled steel, I simply cut out eggs. Besides the sheer pleasure of form and color, eggs are the metaphor for all that is to be. When cut from junk they are also a reminder of what has been. I invite Sculpture Fest visitors to find them all, near birches, stone walls, hidden in the tufts of a field, a vernal pond, at the edge of a pine wood, near a red barn and a white garden.

It was my great pleasure to contribute to Sculpture Fest 2002. The final result is a combination of many collaborations and much supportive cajoling. Friends helped me locate wonderful enamel scraps and the crushed oil tanks I used for the umbralla figures. Peter Davenport worked non-stop to clear and mow the grounds, which is a massive work of art in and of itself. He used his magical tractor to install the large work reducing a huge effort into a 'piece of cake'. Charlet never let me lose heart, and remained optimistic from the very rainy start, through equipment failures and the vanishing point of time.

-Madeleine Lord, August 2002

Other venues:

Spirits in the Trees , Forest Hills MA
Tamarack Gallery, Craftsbury VT
Patricia Corega Gallery, North Sandwich NH
Sassy Sissie Winchester, MA

from top: "Urban Posters," 1995; umbrella person, 2002 and eggs, 2002, on sculpturefest site. all works are torch-cut steel.