Forces of Nature: Renwick Invitational 2020: Renwick Invitational 2020

"Forces of Nature: Renwick Invitational 2020 features four remarkable artists who use materials of the earth-indigo, glass, paper, metal-to explore our relationship with nature and help us understand our place in a world increasingly chaotic and divorcedfrom our physical landscape. Textile artist Rowland Ricketts farms his own indigo, beginning his practice not with dyeing or weaving cloth but with planting seeds. Many of his works incorporate participation from non-artists and strategic exposure of cloth to light, revealing relationships between nature, people, and the passage of time. Lauren Fensterstock draws on the natural world to find metaphors that get at the root of why we do what we do. In a site-specific installation for the Renwick, Fensterstock transforms the galleries with meticulously crafted comets and clouds, encrusted in baroque patterns of obsidian and Bohemian cut glass, that hover above a seductive yet ominous landscape. Debora Moore's work in glass is deeply informed by her own study of nature, having traversed the globe in search of flora, mainly orchids, in situ. Her installation of four human-size flowering glass trees are evocative both for their remarkable detail and beauty and for their ability to elicit deep emotion. Timothy Horn, best known for extravagant wall pieces made from cast metals, crystal, and blown and mirrored glass, emphasizes our complicated relationship with nature by taking inspiration from both highly stylized seventeenth-century jewelry patterns and nineteenth-century studies of natural forms. Throughout the essays, authors Emily Zilber, Nora Atkinson, and Stefano Catalani explore questions not just at the core of craft, but vital to our present moment. They reveal how each artist uses nature as a guide, partner, adversary, ward, and inspiration. Begun in 2000, the Renwick Invitational is a biennial series designed to celebrate artists deserving of wider recognition. Forces of Nature is the ninth installment in the series. Other titles in the Renwick Invitational series include Disrupting Craft (2018), Visions and Revisions (2016), History in the Making (2011), and Staged Stories (2009)"--
Forces of Nature: Renwick Invitational 2020 features artists Lauren Fensterstock, Timothy Horn, Debora Moore, and Rowland Ricketts. Nature provides a way for these invited artists to ask what it means to be human in a world increasingly chaotic and divorced from our physical landscape. Representing craft media from fiber to mosaic to glass and metals, these artists approach the long history of art’s engagement with the natural world through unconventional and highly personal perspectives.Forces of Nature: Renwick Invitational 2020 is the ninth installment of the Renwick Invitational. Established in 2000, this biennial showcase highlights midcareer and emerging makers who are deserving of wider national recognition.The featured artists work in a wide variety of media, from Lauren Fensterstock, who creates detailed, large-scale installations using intensive modes of making drawn from the decorative arts, including paper quilling and mosaic, and from whom SAAM has commissioned a site-specific work—inspired in part by the illustrated renaissance German manuscript The Book of Miracles -—that will transform an entire gallery at the Renwick, to Timothy Horn, who creates exaggerated adornments that combine natural and constructed worlds, taking inspiration from objects as varied as baroque jewellery patterns and Victorian era detailed studies of lichen, coral, and seaweed, from bronze and glass, as well as unusual materials like crystalized rock sugar, to evoke the extravagant Amber Room in the Catherine the Great’s palace of Tsarskoye Selo; and from Debora Moore, known for her exquisitely detailed glass renderings of orchids, and who is represented in this volume in her new series, Arboria (2018), in which Moore focuses less on realism and more on capturing an intensely personal experience of beauty and wonder, to Rowland Ricketts who creates immersive installations using handwoven and hand-dyed cloth, starting on his farm, where he cultivates the indigo plants he uses to colour his artwork, fully linking his material and process with the finished product. Participatory engagement from non-artists, forms a major part of Rickett’s work, emphasizing the relationship between nature, culture, the passage of time, and everyday life.
All of the artists use the topic of Nature as a means of asking what it is to be human in a world increasingly chaotic and divorced from our physical landscape.