Tag: Green Art

Elements of Japandi: Integrating Nature – materials and environment

The Fall 2021 exhibition at browngrotta arts,  Japandi: shared aesthetics and influences will celebrate affinities between Japan and the Nordic countries of Sweden, Finland, Norway and Denmark cultures through contemporary art. The show will feature 39 fiber and ceramic artists from Denmark, Finland, Japan, Norway, and Sweden. xJapandi is a hybrid union of Japanese and Scandinavian aesthetic approaches appreciated for its reverence for nature and natural, sustainable materials, exceptional craftsmanship, simplicity and minimalism, and the beauty of embracing imperfection. This union evokes a visual and physical sense of calm and tranquility. The exhibition will run from September 25 through October 3, 2021.

Left: Jane Balsgaard (Denmark), Right: Kiyomi Iwata (Japan)

While attention on Japandi style may be currently popular, the interest in this merge of aesthetics is far from new. Artists and designers from the Nordic countries and Japan have been observing the parallels in their work and cultures for decades. Cultural and geographic elements made the Japanese work particularly appealing to Scandinavian artisans when it was first introduced to artists in the region in the 1800s. Both Japan and Northern European countries are deeply wooded and both have developed acclaimed woodworking traditions — in Scandinavia, techniques used by the Vikings and to protect against brutal winters, writes Danielle Johnson (Japonisme and the Origin of Modern Scandinavian Design,” OOKKUU, November 04, 2016.) The Japanese introduced new techniques, simplified forms, and most importantly, an approach towards woodworking that the Scandinavians deeply appreciated. The Scandinavians witnessed the fine craftsmanship and the sense of the natural materials that Japanese artisans brought to their work — particularly the manner in which the Japanese explored the wood’s essence, using minimal, refined designs so as not to detract from the experience from the viewer’s engagment with the materials. 

“[B]oth cultures have developed in harsh natural environments that humans cannot control. I feel a common point for us is how to live comfortably with nature.” Kato Saeko, curator of The Shop at the cultural centre Japan House, London. (“The rise of ‘Japandi’ style,” Clare DowdyBBC Online, October 2019.) Finland’s Ambassador to Japan, Pekka Orpana, also acknowledged the respect for nature shared by the regions. “We come from different cultures and are very far apart, but it’s actually quite surprising how similarly [the Finnish and Japanese] visualize and see our way of life …. We have a lot of similarities that unite us … for instance, how we appreciate nature and design.”  

Left: Hisako Sekijima (Japan), Right: Gjertrud Halls (Denmark)

Hisako Sekijima, one of the artists in Japandi, has recognized, and embraced, the influences the cultures share. She sees a greater kinship in her approach to that taken by Nordic artisans than to the traditional aesthetics of her native Japan which are often ascribed to Zen spirit or a stylized empathy to nature in terms ofka-cho-fu-getsu (natural imageries of flower, bird, wind and the moon). Her explorations into the elegant or logical interplay between natural materials and structural methods have more to do with elemental processing of materials than emotional expressions. “When I use a branch of tree to make a basket, it becomes a kind of abstract component — a linear element with a certain role. For example, when a branch becomes a tool used to reach fruits on a high branch.” She sees a similar similar shifting of the materials’ nature in the Scandinavian object making. “Their manner is straightforward and elemental as well as universal.” 

Left: Jiro Yonezawa, Right: Eva Vargö

Paper is another natural material that Japanese and Nordic artists highlight in their work. “Simplicity, purity and a respect for materials is intrinsic to Japanese craft and their work links East and West by celebrating the inherent properties of paper (some areas are softly translucent, and overlaid areas exploit varying opacities) and accurately balancing material, technique and form, ” writes Sarah E. Braddock, textile lecturer, writer & curator (Project Papermoon catalogDenmark, 2000) It was in Japan where  Swedish artist Eva Vargö first experience how Japanese washi paper, especially when produced in the traditional way, exhibits a unique quality. The most interesting, in her view, was to experience how light filters through papers from lamps, paper shoji screen doors and windows. Danish artist Jane Balsgaard spent time in Japan in 1993 and 1998, preparing for exhibits there. Works of paper and twigs were the result. In her work, white paper often contrasts the dark color of the willow twigs.  “Another element in her works that has connection to Japan,” writes Mirjam Golfer-Jørgensen, “is the skeleton, that partly  frames the paper, partly combines with the hollows in the constuction, and gives another character to the paper that with a lightness that creates a contrast towards to the hollows.” (Influences from Japan in Dansh Art and Design 1870 – 2010, Mirjam Golfer-Jørgensen, Danish Architectural Press, 2013.)

Join us at  Japandi: shared aesthetics and influences to see more ways in which these influences are exhanged and expressed. The hours of exhibtion are: Opening and Artist Reception: Saturday, September 25th: 11 to 6; Sunday, September 26th: 11 to 6; Monday, September 27th through Saturday October 2nd: 10 to 5; Sunday, October 3rd: 11 to 6; Advanced time reservations are mandatory; Appropriate Covid protocols will be followed. There will be a full-color catalog prepared for the exhibition available at browngrotta.com on September 24th.


Process Notes:  Gyöngy Laky’s Variant — Meaning

Gyöngy Laky’s work, Variant, a three-dimensional sculpture of “V” was featured in browngrotta arts’ recent exhibition, Adaptation: Artists Respond to ChangeLaky often creates words and symbols. In this post she tells us why the “V.” In next week’s post, she shares the impetus behind her choice of materials — specifically, golf tees. 

Q with No A, Gyöngy Laky, Photo by Tom Grotta

“A recurring theme in my art lexicon is language, symbols, signs and glyphic shapes and communication they inspire when in sculptural form,” says Laky.  “Words fascinate me, their origins and what playing with them explores.  Letters are word’s vehicles.  Letter forms, like symbols, are lyrical, suggestive. A letter standing alone can convey much. ‘Q,’ a favorite subject of several sculptures, is no longer… given the assault on democracy on January 6, 2021.

“Learning languages is play for me:  Early, I spoke Hungarian and German (mother, also Polish and French, father, English). Age 5, as refugees to the U.S., came English (French fluency in High School and a Paris year). Short studies of Russian, Hindi, Japanese, Mandarin, Italian and Spanish and playing with Catalan, Yiddish, Greek and Dutch followed.

“Many words came to play new, large roles with Covid 19.  Early in 2020, ‘novel’ caught my eye.  Articles I read with urgent interest to understand the new virus, to my surprise, used ‘novel’ corona. Novel? New?  New crown?  It was puzzling.  Scientists use ‘novel’ as a provisional name until a permanent makes sense.  We all know coronas as the common cold… but this one is devastating – a pandemic within weeks of appearing.

Gyöngy Laky 201L Variant ash, huge ripstixx Mustang Red 30” x 20” x 4” 2021. Photo by Tom Grotta

I became curious about the Latin plural form of virus discovering ‘viri’ translates as ‘men.’

The label ‘variant’ is ubiquitous warning us of impending danger. In the months of creating Variant it was everywhere, every day, accompanied by warnings and on April 5, 2021, I read about the new variant, ‘Eeek,’ a double mutation!  ‘Eeek?’  Again, the scientists got right to the crux.  A mutation named ‘Eeek’ calls for immediate high alert to danger.

As the word ‘variant’ drilled deep it occurred to me that we had recently experienced another devastating variant, a political variant, a leader with no governmental, administrative experience who was as unexpectedly dangerous as the following Covid 19.”

More on Variant on next week’s arttextstyle.


Artist Focus: Gyöngy Laky

From City Tree Trimmings to Industrial Harvest, Artist Gyöngy Laky’s Textile Architecture Addresses Contemporary Environmental Issues

Kristina Ratliff and Ryan Urcia

Laky 1997 studio portrait in front of That Word. Photo by Tom Grotta
Portrait of Gyöngy Laky by Tom Grotta 1997. In the background, That Word.

While many artists work conceptually to inspire awareness and address issues of climate change, artists of Fiber Art and Modern Craft have a unique and inherently harmonious relationship with the environment, from their intimate use of natural materials to the fundamentally “slow art” process of hand craftsmanship. 

In terms of the materials they use, they most often come from the earth, from private garden cultivation and harvesting to regional sourcing of plant life – such as bamboo, willow and cedar, and their earthy “scraps” such as branches, grasses, bark and twigs – impress an intrinsic awareness of the origin of things. This, coupled with the preservation of age-old techniques such as weaving, knotting, tying and bundling, earn these creatives rightful acclaim as stewards at the interconnection of art and nature. 

Details of Gyöngy Laky's works
Left to right, top to bottom: Stain 2000, Shifting Currents 2011, Big Question 2007, Our Egg 2018, Cradle to Cradle 2007, Ec Claim! 2014, Occupy 2017, Alterations 2008, Dry Land Drifter 2010

San Francisco-based artist Gyöngy Laky (most people call her Ginge, with a soft “g”) is known for her sculptural vessels, typographical wall sculptures, and site-specific outdoor works composed of materials harvested from nature — such as wood gleaned from orchard pruning, park and garden trimmings, street trees and forests of California — and discarded objects she considers “industrial harvest” such as recycled materials and post-consumer bits from surplus such as screws, nails, telephone wire.

“These annually renewable linear elements are regarded as discards,” Laky notes. “In my studio practice, however, they are employed as excellent and hardy materials.

Gyöngy Laky studio detail
Laky studio, 2018. Photo by Tom Grotta

Born in Hungary in 1944, the physical and emotional effects of war impacted Laky from a very young age and her works often have underlying themes of opposition to war and militarism as well as climate change and the environment, gender equality. Her family emigrated to the US in 1949, resettling in Ohio, Oklahoma and eventually, California.

“After escaping the ravages of war as refugees,” she remembers, Nature’s embrace slowly healed my family,” 

Portrait of the artist working on a piece
Gyöngy Laky working on a piece in her studio, 2018. Photo by Tom Grotta

As a professor at the University of California, Davis for 28 years, Laky was instrumental in developing Environmental Design as an independent department (now the Department of Design). Here, she became fascinated by grids, latticework, tensile structures, strut-and-cable construction and other architectural and engineering linear assemblages. Coupled with her extensive background in textiles, she uses hand-construction techniques based in textile work to build sculptures invigorated by her attraction to the human cleverness of building things. She calls this discipline “Textile Architecture”.  

“The vertical and horizontal elements of textile technology – ubiquitous in textile constructions of all sorts – underpins so much of human ingenuity about making things and led us, eventually, to the age of computers.  In the context of a personal examination of our complex relationship with the world around us, my work often combines materials sourced from nature with screws, nails or ‘bullets for building’ (as the drywall screws I like are, ironically, called). The incongruity of hardware protruding from branches hints at edgy relationships as well as the flux of human interaction with nature,”  says Laky.

Laky is also known for her outdoor and temporary site-specific installations,  including land art works in Italy, which have all addressed nature and environmental sustainability issues.  In 2008, she was commissioned by The New York Times to create sculptures for their “green” issue dedicated to Earth Day. This cover work, titled Alterations, contrasts natural apple wood and grapevine with rough industrial materials, tenuously joined by metal screws, nails, bullets and wire which figuratively, literally and symbolically represent  direct and subtle messages about the interdependence of man and nature.

Laky’s works are in the permanent collections of museums including MoMA in New York, Philadelphia Museum of Art, and Smithsonian.  She has had solo exhibitions at Officinet Gallery, Danish Arts and Crafts Association in Copenhagen and Royal Institute of British Architects Gallery, Manchester, and has shown at San Francisco Museum of Art, Renwick Gallery, De Young Museum, and International Biennial of Tapestry in Lausanne, to name a few. She is the recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts Grant and a fellow of American Craft Council. For a full list visit browngrotta.com.

For the upcoming exhibition Volume 50: Chronicling Fiber Art for Three Decades at browngrotta arts in Wilton, CT (September 12-20),  Laky continues her personal examination of the complex relationships we have with the world around us and will be presenting three works – Deviation, We Turn and Traverser

Deviation by Gyöngy Laky, 2020. Photo by Tom Grotta

Laky’s typographical wall sculpture, Deviation, is made of apple trimmings, acrylic paint and screws. It portrays many meanings, from functioning like diacritical marks representing “Oh, Why?” to the myriad implications and emotions of the word “Oy” –  the Yiddish word meaning woe, dismay or annoyance – or, if flipped, “Yo” – a slang salutation for “hello” or representing “good luck” rolling an 11 in the game of craps, the only number that always wins.

See more in our exhibition, Volume 50: Chronicling Fiber Art for Three Decades at browngrotta arts in Wilton, CT (September 12-20), http://www.browngrotta.com/Pages/calendar.php


Influence and Evolution Introduction: Tim Johnson

Tim Johnson Butterbur baskets. Photo by Tom Grotta

Tim Johnson Butterbur baskets. Photo by Tom Grotta

Tim Johnson, a sculptor of natural materials, is among the artists included featured in Influence and Evolution: Fiber Sculpture then and now, opening April 24th at browngrotta arts in Wilton, Connecticut and continuing until May 3rd. Like pioneer fiber artist Ed Rossbach, Johnson is an incessant experimenter — with material, technique, venue. Last November, for example, he spent several weeks exploring the pastures, cow tracks, streams and pathways that make up Briddlesford Lodge Farm

25. Tim Johnson Invisible Pathways Briddlesford Lodge Farm Residency. Photo by Tim Johnson

25. Tim Johnson Invisible Pathways Briddlesford Lodge Farm Residency. Photo by Tim Johnson

on the Isle of Wight. As the farm’s first Artist in Residence Johnson was invited to create the inaugural exhibition in the newly restored and architecturally re-designed Hop Kilns Heritage Center.Using a variety of materials gathered on the farm including Butcher’s Broom, Hazel, Honeysuckle, cow muck and bailer twine, he created a series of suspended panels that investigated the layered history of the land’s usage and geography. Black bailer twine is embroidered mapping out fields and pathways, twilled cane picks up patterns from an old winnowing fan in the heritage centre’s collection and Ash twigs reference the hedgerows, hurdles and coppiceing traditions of the island. “I am more than happy to admit the influence of makers such as Ed Rossbach, whose book, The New Basketry, I bought for the mighty sum of £1.50 when I was still a schoolboy in the 80s,” Johnson says. “While for many years the influence

Tim Johnson Rush Baskets

Tim Johnson-rush.baskets. Photo by Tom Grotta

did not emerge in my work and I did not understand how to work with basketry techniques and materials, when I eventually started making baskets it was like coming home to the work I had always wanted to make.” A series of Johnson’s vessels, made of rush and Butterbur, will be featured in Influence and Evolution, which opens at 1pm on April 24th. The Artists Reception and Opening is on Saturday April 25th, 1pm to 6pm. The hours for Sunday April 27th through May 3rd are 10am to 5pm. To make an appointment earlier or later, call: 203-834-0623.


Eco-Art Update: Images for Earth Day

Many of the artists promoted by browngrotta arts address nature and environmental concerns in their work.  In honor of Earth Day, we present a series of images of works from Europe, Asia, the US and the UK.  These include outdoor sculptures by Chris Drury and Ceca Georgieva,  ethereal sculptures of jute by Naoko Serino and a complex new basket, A Panic of Leaves by John McQueen, made of sticks and strings.

Green Leaves by Ceca Georgieva, photos by Ceca Georgieva

Green Leaves by Ceca Georgieva, photos by Ceca Georgieva

These are images of some of Ceca Georgieva’s “park art experiments.” Georgieva is a textile artist working in the field of nature art. “Working with natural materials not only brings me joy,” she says, “but also much wisdom. In even the smallest piece of grass there is incorporated history, meaning and purpose. I admire and learn from her genius “installation” of design, color, smell and light … It is a great challenge to enter her laboratory and to be able to add my own thing.”

Window on Blood and Water by Chris Drury, photos by Chris Drury

Window on Blood and Water by Chris Drury, photos by Chris Drury

Window on Blood and Water is a temporary installation at Abbaye Jumieges, near Rouen in France created by Chris Drury for the region’s festival of Water. The work takes the shape and dimensions of the arch of the ruined church and fills it with a flow pattern of water and blood from the heart, drawing a link to the nearby river Seine and the Abbey’s violent history over the centuries. The work is 78.75 feet x 26.25 feet and is made from split logs and stones from the ruin. The exhibition of six works opens on May 14, 2013 and runs through the Summer/Autumn season.

Naoko Serino Detail, photo by Naoko Serino

Naoko Serino Detail, photo by Naoko Serino

Works made entirely of jute are created by Naoko Serino of Japan. Moon Lee says that in Serino’s work,”the golden sheen and sinuous strands of jute yield a most spectacular softness and luminosity. The natural fibers are spun densely or pulled thin, making for infinite gradations of densities. Irregular shapes in varying degrees of transparency provoke an effect that is strongly biological. Spheres, tubes, tubes contained within spheres, spheres contained within cubes, and rows of coiled strands evoke thoughts of phospholipid bilayers of cell membranes, veins, sea sponges, and so forth.” http://thecreatorsproject.vice.com/blog/naoko-serino-spins-vegetable-fiber-into-golden-sculptures.

A Panic of Leaves by John McQueen, photo by Tom Grotta

A Panic of Leaves by John McQueen, photo by Tom Grotta

John McQueen’s vessel form celebrates leaves — their diversity of shape and color. McQueen often “draws” with sticks, in ways that make a viewer consider his or her relationship to the world. “Steel is natural,” he says, “because it comes from an iron ore in the ground. But when you look at steel, you don’t connect it with the ground because it’s been processed so many times, whereas there’s a direct visual connection between looking at my work and seeing the world.”