Artist Spotlight :: Kate Joranson

The following is a guest blog post by artist Kate Joranson. Kate is currently exhibiting three pieces in Gestures: An Exhibition of Small Site-Specific Works, which runs through June 21, 2009. Over the course of several days, she felt her way through Winifred Lutz’s Garden Installation here at the Mattress Factory.



While wearing work gloves, I ran my hands over the brick, stone, and concrete walls, rusted metal, boulders, crevices, plants, etc. The gloves got more and more worn each day, thinning and softening. Holes appeared in the fingertips and several seams ripped.

    

While working, I:

- scaled the garden wall
- dunked my hands in the water
- felt the ponytail-like grasses
- avoided disturbing the moss
- avoided disturbing spider and insect homes
- kept thinking about what it might have been like to actually make the walls
- wished I could get down below the grate, in the cistern

    

The gloves (and the paper rubbings) both connect me and remove me from the stones, plants, etc. My paper and leather surfaces take on the contours of what they come into contact with and absorb the space. I've also been thinking about pressure, and how the paper and the gloves become marked by the Garden. I'm captivated by how Winifred Lutz put the Garden in motion and then let go, allowing natural and human-made forces to take over. I wanted to find a way to attend to all these ongoing changes.

Its interesting to have done this in the spring, since so much changes each day, and the birds are so active. It would be interesting to do this in each of the 4 seasons.