About 7 or 8 years ago I saw an exhibition of the work of Beverly Penn at the Lisa Sette Gallery in Arizona and it knocked me out. As primarily a photo person it was exciting to get completely energized by another medium and to learn about Beverly's amazing process of casting impossibly detailed replicas of real plants in bronze (click any image to enlarge.)
The work was out of my price range and I was still in the old house and didn't have any room for it anyway so it got filed away in the "amazing artists that I will just have to appreciate in my minds eye" file. Fast forward to 2014. Lisa was moving her gallery from Scottsdale to Phoenix and the subject of Beverly's work came up in conversation and her piece that Ellen and I had been particularly drawn to called Twin was still available. We now had a spectacular location for it in the new house and the moving sale gave us a bit of a discount which helped us stretch our budget and so we decided to take the plunge. We had to wait a few more months as the piece was installed in an exhibition in California but Cassilhaus was going to be the forever home of this amazing piece.
Twin, from Beverly's Weeds series, takes its name from two coexisting (near her home in Austin Texas) invasive species-thistle and hydrilla. The piece is 72"x72"x15" and came to us as 31 individual pieces in 5 giant boxes. We decided to place it on the large wall in our main stairwell because you could view it from 3 sides including the sundeck, we didn't need to worry about exposure to the sun, and you could get a very close view of the piece but still be far enough away so you wouldn't accidentally brush against its very sharp edges. Installation was a fascinating and weekend long process with very detailed instructions. A couple of places in the instructions it said "DO NOT PROCEED ANY FURTHER UNTIL THE ARTIST IS PRESENT TO ASSIST." We called Beverly and she talked us through it. The piece came with a large paper template which we taped to the wall at the installation location and drilled about 100 holes in the wall per the marks on the template. We were instructed to mark each hole we drilled with a colored check mark so we would be sure not to miss any. Because the piece had been installed multiple times before there were about 7 sets of check marks in all different colors. This video from the Austin Art Museum of Beverly installing her piece Genius Loci gives you a glimpse of the process.
Ellen and I were pretty quick studies
The pieces were individually numbered and needed to be installed in numeric order as they sometimes intertwined with each other. The template indicated the orientation of each piece and the drill bits were precisely sized so that the metal spikes on each piece tightly fit into the drywall holes.
Here we are getting to the pieces that have both thistle and the heavier hydrilla which form the center of the piece.
The large center piece, unlike all of the other pieces wrapped in bubble wrap, was shipped surrounded by loose styrofoam peanuts and it took Ellen nearly 45 minutes to get all of them away from the sharp sculpture elements using a metal kabob stick.
This is NOT a light piece of metal!
Twin looks great next to Patrick Dougherty's Walkabout.
We were a little bit freaked out that we found 3 small segments of the piece that had broken off in shipping. Beverly casts these pieces in 4-5 inch lengths and welds them together so it was not too surprising. We called her and as luck would have it she was coming to North Carolina in a few months to give a talk at ECU at a metals conference and she said she could come and make a repair on site! Thanks to the generous lending of an acetylene torch by our friends at Jewelsmith, Beverly was able to bring everything else she needed to do the repair and did it right in our carport.
She used high resolution photographs of the piece to make sure she got the pieces back in exactly the right spots.
She adds a patina to give the piece an even more lifelike appearance. In less than an hour the piece was back together and good as new.
While she was coming all this way we convinced her to stay with us for a few days (part of our evil plan to get her to come back as an artist in residence). She agreed to do an artist talk the evening she did the repair and we are all pretty blown away by the technical and philosophical underpinnings of the work.
While we didn't record the talk, you can good a good glimpse of her process in this recording from a talk at the Grace Museum. It includes her talking about the fabrication of our piece Twin.
Thank you Beverly for expanding our world and bringing so much beauty to it.
Comments