Barbara Bowling
(Enamel, Metal)
| Sewing cards. Remember them? In my first memory, I am on a boat with my dad, who is fishing. I am three years old and threading bright yarn through holes in equally bright cardboard with a blunt needle. A couple of years later, I find old curtains in the basement, and play with them for hours, eventually figuring out how to sew a seam (inside out!), and make gathers (big stitches, drawn tight!). I make a dress for my best-friend doll, Cinderella.
I have been thus driven for all of my remembered life. So it is not so surprising that after fifteen years as a plant science professor, I find myself once again making things full-time, rather than in stolen moments. In those intervening years, so full of practical considerations, I developed an enormous respect for plant life. Plants fill the world with function and beauty simultaneously. No life could Be without their primary existence, and yet they live their lives of incomprehensible utility, exquisite beauty and languid grace without expectation of appreciation or recognition. Their sensual, graceful forms and jewel-like colors inspire and inhabit my work, often in abstraction, but still evident to even the casual viewer. I make things because I am compelled and inspired to. The media I chose changes. The need to create as a means of connecting to creation . . . to express what’s inside to the outside . . . to produce a compelling object . . . never does. |
