Like many people, I’ve grown to appreciate the craftier side of art during the coronavirus pandemic. We’re all staying home a lot more these days, trying to keep our germ-carrying molecules to ourselves, and so naturally those creative practices that have traditionally been pursued in homes rather than formal artist studios feel relevant, and often inspirational, in the moment.
That means I’ve started following #crossstitch and #calligraphy on Instagram and looking at more quilts, collage and photography on Facebook. I added a small ceramic piece to my household art collection and watched, along with 122,831 other viewers, an instructional YouTube video headlined, “Amazing origami umbrella that opens and closes.”
I’ve also been drawn to local artists who practice the best of this kind of work in Colorado — people like Michelle Lamb, who is currently exhibiting at Core New Art Space in Lakewood.
If you go
Michelle Lamb’s exhibition “Metalmorphosis” continues through Dec. 20 at Core New Art Space, 6851 W. Colfax Ave., Lakewood. It’s free. Info at 303-297-8428 or coreartspace.com.
Lamb is a passionate recycler who transforms cast-off objects from everyday living into small, handmade sculptures that she sells, for modest prices, to buyers near and far. Her talent is to unearth unexpected qualities in materials we tend to take for granted and employ them in novel ways.
A bicycle chain is transformed into flowing locks of hair on a female goddess figure or repurposed as long, wavy tentacles on a jellyfish. A wire breadbasket turned upside down becomes a sunhat, and model train tracks are used to form the frets on a guitar.
The work is one-part folk art and one-part fine art, and there are long and respected traditions of this kind of “assemblage art” in both genres.
Museum-level names like Joseph Cornell, Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg built their reputations by combining old things with new things to create, original abstract pieces.
But so have scores of lesser-known outsider artists who use everything from rusty I-beams to broken beer bottles to trashed truck tires as raw materials. Their work has traditionally been overlooked, though lately people are starting to pay attention, with places like Watts Towers in Los Angeles and Philadelphia’s Magic Gardens — both large-scale environments made from urban detritus like broken plates and glass and steel rebar — emerging as bona fide historic sites.
Lamb’s work falls in-between the high and the low, though it’s elevated by the quality that brings the best craft alive: workmanship. Her pieces may sometimes rely too much on cleverness, but they are always thoughtfully composed and very well-constructed.
And, similar to other artists, she has developed a vocabulary that, instead of using words, expresses ideas through the repeated use of found objects as symbols.
Her “Swan,” a figurative piece whose title describes its form, shows how she brings it all together. The neck is made from the arm of an old rocking chair, wrapped in metal measuring tape; a vintage luncheon tray and a wooden bill organizer serve as the underbody; the head is made from a salad spoon.
The piece goes on and on: the webbed feet are made from serving forks; the beak from a garlic crusher and the mass of feathers that flow off the fowl’s back from “knitting needles, wooden rulers, railroad tracks, recorders, spindles, kitchen tongs, a rasp, dice, dominos and porcelain wheels,” as she describes her list of media.
Lamb fuels her practice by scouting for raw materials at thrift stories, garage sales and estate sales. People also give her things knowing she will put them to good use. She keeps it all organized in her home studio where she also teaches private classes.
The large stock allows her the freedom to rummage through her inventory for inspiration. She finds it in chess pieces that she glues bottom-to-bottom to form the nose and corona of her seahorse-shaped “Equum Aquam.”
Or she finds it in the spatula that serves as the pelvic fin of her fish piece, “Pescado,” or the antique caliper that creates the antlers for her table-top deer sculpture, “Lunar Latitude.”
Lamb adds dabs of paint or color washes to some works and she also experiments with faux finishes that could be purchased at hobby shops. Most of the work is figurative though much of it is abstract or in the middle. The piece “Symmetricos,” for example, might be a Native American kachina doll or it might simply be a symmetrical, two-dimensional concoction made from a deconstructed hardboiled egg cutter.
Regardless, she invites viewers into her practice by keeping her process front-and-center. She doesn’t cover up the original qualities of her found objects; she highlights them. A viewer can still see the egg cutters and the pawns and the typewriter keys — only they see them differently. This is what compelling art does: It keeps us looking, and it unfolds through repeated examination.
In this case, it also tells stories. The found objects retain their personality; it is clear they’ve lived previous lives and their biographies supply the backdrop for the narrative that seems to exist in each of Lamb’s creations. The finished pieces, with their surprise endings, serve as the final chapters.
This kind of art doesn’t always fly in museums or high-end galleries and it’s not for everyone. There’s a homespun essence to Lamb’s work that can put some pieces in a category that could be described as hobby-shop fare. When an artist relies on found objects, quality varies depending on the find.
Lamb manages her way through these obstacles and succeeds by doing the hard work it requires. Each piece depends on long and thoughtful experimentations with materials and objects whose functions are fixed in our minds and which don’t easily give up what else they could become. Sure, a bike chain can double as hair, but it doesn’t tell you that; you have to figure it out.
Lamb’s skill is in the seeing, in the combining, in a respect for the past and an understanding of all the fun and enlightenment that is possible through reinvention.
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