Our April artist in residence is North Carolina based sculptor Patrick Dougherty. Check out his site here. We are very excited that he is doing a piece in our house and we started today. Patrick works with sticks, mostly maple saplings, and we spent a few days last week with Patrick gathering in local forests with help from Ellen's whole office and other project volunteers.
Esther and Keith gather a bundle.
We filled up a pick up and a Uhaul trailer on day 1 and we had quite a beautiful day. Our legs were not so beautiful after some really dense briars.
James, our project foreman, starts a stack of bundles in our front yard.
The guy at the scaffolding rental place had some trouble wrapping his brain around the bizarre configuration I requested to go over top our dining canopy and it came in 100 pieces without instructions so it took me the better part of two days to assemble with the only casualty being a brutally expensive Italian light fixture--ouch!
We went into major house protection mode in the morning.
We are working with filmmakers Kenny Dalsheimer (documenting our cat Fripp) and Penelope Maunsell to make a movie about Patrick's work and have been filming his recent installations including the monumental one at the new NCMA building and an installation on Main Street in Rock Hill SC. Thanks to Zan Maddox for the amazing images on the Gallery Up blog. Kenny and Penelope starting filming at our place this morning and set up two time lapse cameras. Here Penelope and lighting guru Keith set up the first of the time lapse units which takes one frame every two minutes.
We wanted to give Patrick a grid to attach his initial base sticks to so we devised a system of eye bolts screwed into studs and aircraft cable.
Patrick started weaving sticks about 1 pm and made amazing progress.
Our stick debudding and quality control team consisted of James, my sister Barb, and Ellen's mother Anita. Barb and Anita came to town for the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival and decided to stay on to work with Patrick.
We spent a good bit of time talking with Patrick about exactly how the piece would look. We have a crazy plan of having it wind throughout the house. Patrick advises that sticks often have a mind of their own and decide where they will go and what the final outcome will be. We are very happy with the results for the day.
STAY TUNED!
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