5

Mags Harries + Lajos Heder

These Lamps once lighted the streets of Cambridge and then were discarded at the Department of Public Works.

Transforming these forms by stacking them upon each other as columns, they still emit light but take on a new life as Sentinels in the grounds of the Manship Residency.

6

Marilu Swett

I make work in the dual areas of sculpture and drawing. My work reflects my interest in biological form, its volume, complexity and variety. I indicate this in a general and fanciful way, by abstracting, inventing, and overlapping relationships to indicate space and slow movement. The work shifts between the layered space of my ink drawings and the factual space occupied by sculpture. References include natural systems and subsystems, microscopic form, telluric and oceanic form, images from the human body, and industrial artifacts. GLOW has repeated organic forms reminiscent of ocean, insect and celestial forms. Cast in dyed resin using phosphorescent pigment that charges in daylight, the piece glows with waning light. The installation pattern is an interpretation the flight patterns of fireflies, and of stars in our galaxy; the glow, of the phosphorescence of Gloucester’s many sea creatures. The undulation is a nod to the location of Gloucester on the Atlantic.

7

Murray Dewart

I am partial to how the sculptor Barlach described his work: "An interval of longing between a where-from and a where-to."

8

Chris Frost

Paul Manship's Prometheus sculpture at Rockefeller Center is accompanied with a quote from Aeschylus, "Prometheus, teacher in every art, brought the fire that hath proved to mortals a means to mighty ends". The fire of the Gods in the hands of humans is a gift that is both a productive tool and a destructive weapon.

9

Jessica Strauss

I have always loved how the water reflects the sky. My constructed Big Dipper floating in the Manship quarry will enhance this illusion. I have chosen the imagery of the Big Dipper both because it is the most recognizable constellation but also for its historic reference to the "Drinking Gourd" which served as a guiding light to enslaved people journeying north in their quest for freedom.

10

Jodi Colella

Passementerie trace back to the early nomads of the Middle East who designed ornate ropes to suspend their tents. In the 18th century weaving guilds of France they were ornaments signifying social distinction for aristocracy, clergy and the military. Much like the Manship estate they are a survivor from a former time. The word translates literally into “turning of the hand” to serve ceremonial pageantry adding fanfare to our celebration of light. These tassels are created from humble materials to counter the ostentatious nature of the object’s display and relate to the geography of the place. Fishing ropes designed for the maritime fabricate into elaborate large scale ornaments. The white polypropylene glows in response to black light as if an exotic nocturnal blossom.

11

Christina Zwart

Two things struck me when I visited the Manship property: the ladders on the grounds and around Lanesville and Gloucester, and the glass fishing floats nestled in a basket in the living room of the house. Both are carefully-crafted tools designed for dangerous and deadly vocations, but that procure majestic and miraculous gifts from bodies of water. Both are fragile yet strong--wood against stone, glass against the power of the ocean. My father was in the U.S. Navy for 28 years, and we had a mound of blue/green, glass, Japanese fishing net floats in our house that he had collected during his time in the Pacific. I knew I wanted to build something incorporating the two and arrived at a nest held up by ladders and cradling three floats resembling eggs, themselves fortified enough to produce life, yet vulnerable in perilous circumstances.

12

Michelle Lougee

My work addresses the impact of our consumerist society on nature. The forms are joyful reverence to nature – with a warning. Produced from crocheted post-consumer plastic that would otherwise find its way to a landfill, whimsical and playful forms illustrate tension between material and concept, while contemplating profound problems in our culture and environment.

Single use plastic is formed into sculptural representations of marine phytoplankton in my work. Inspired by the similarities in the shapes of some discarded plastics and marine organisms, I use discarded plastic as building components in representations of magical and otherworldly marine life.

I have developed a multi step fiber technique using disposable single use plastic to make sculpture for my personal studio work. Plastic newspaper sleeves are collected, sorted and processed into “plarn” before I begin to crochet my work. Then crocheted forms are custom fitted with an armature and assembled. Finally, the pieces are coated with resin to protect from the sun. A new series of work is made from collected single use plastic pieces that are too often discarded and forgotten.

I encourage viewers to take a new look at ourselves, our habits, and our precious planet and reflect on our increasingly precarious relationship with the planet by contrasting material with imagery that range from microscopic forms to representations of nature.

13

Ellen Schön

I have always been interested in the ability of ceramic vessels to point to something beyond themselves—to function as metaphor. Ceramic vessels, physically structured with necks, shoulders, bellies, and feet, can evoke the gesture and anthropomorphized stance of the human body. They also reveal deep aspects of human experience and of the natural world.

Paul Manship called his estate “Starfield,” as the sparkling fireflies on his property evoked the stars. My piece, Gathered Glow, is inspired by fireflies, whose lights are unfortunately diminishing due to climate change. Gathered Glow is made of solar string lights, covered by translucent porcelain lanterns, evoking the biomorphic forms of firefly abdomens. These forms are carved, wheel-thrown, and 3D clay-printed. The lanterns hang from and around a tree onsite at MARS. During the day, the porcelain lanterns appear opaque white. In the evening, they emanate soft gold lights in the darkness, metaphors of hope for a restored world.

14

Claudia Olds Goldie

Dappled light is produced when sunlight is filtered through the leaves of trees. The dapples occur as the leaves overlap making many tiny pinhole cameras. These natural cameras produce multiple images of the sun’s surface, which are then projected onto the ground, a wall, or the pavement beneath.

This sculpture is inspired by images of dappled light that I photographed over the course of the summer. As I walked the streets of my neighborhood—the same streets I had walked hundreds of times before-- I became keenly aware of light and shadow. As light filtered through the tree canopy, it projected a richness of pattern and texture, which continuously changed in infinite ways depending on the moment.

Much of the imagery I was seeing brought to mind traditional Chinese landscapes, particularly reminding me of the sweep and flow of elegant cherry blossom paintings. I noticed, too, similarities to the graphic shapes and patterns of wood block printed fabrics from India, Mexican papel picado, and the joyous paper cut-outs by Matisse. Pattern, texture, light, and movement have all played a supporting role on the surfaces of my figurative ceramic sculpture, and now stand center stage in this light inspired, painted ceramic wall piece Dappled Light on Cobbles.

15

Nancy Selvage
By creating sculptures that enhance the significance of a time and place, Selvage desires to see more intensely and coalesce moments of clarity from the complexity of experience. Layers of perforated metal are animated by moiré patterns that vibrate with the viewer's shifting perspective and reflect the artist’s investigations into ephemeral states and illusive territory. “I strive to capture fleeting insights from the flux of life and to engage myself and others in a discovery process.”