Google
Museumgeeks: A strange path to a discovery

Sunday, February 18, 2007

A strange path to a discovery

While reading an article about the uproar over the word "scrotum" being on the first page of a new book by an award-winning children's author (the NYT article notes that "The book’s heroine, a scrappy 10-year-old orphan named Lucky Trimble, hears the word through a hole in a wall when another character says he saw a rattlesnake bite his dog, Roy, on the scrotum"), I saw a mention of www.librarian.net. (I'm going to avoid the whole scrotum debate entirely, thank you.) Along with art and travel, another passion of mine is libraries. A friend and I toyed with the idea of doing a coffee table book on private libraries, ranging from the homey, low-budget cookbook collection of a woman down south to the incredibly expensive, highly designed libraries of moguls like Philip Anschultz. It would still be a dream to do, but it would take a superhuman effort to work on it on top of doing the job that pays my bills. I haven't quite come up with that superhuman energy yet.

Anyway, back to the point of this post: On the librarian.net site, I saw a reference to an old post about a book blog, so clicked on it and wound up on www.barbarayates.blogspot.com. Yates describes herself as "an environmental artist who recycles dead trees into art for parks and retreat centers." A writeup of a workshop she did at Oberlin College in 2000 notes that “Yates began carving wood in 1990 in Ocho Rios, Jamaica. She is also a photographer and her work in both mediums has been exhibited internationally as well as in the U.S.” The book mentioned on the blog was this first one below; for stories behind the making of each book, read this article. (All of these photos are by her, I believe, or at least were all from her site.) But I found even cooler stuff she did when I dug further into her site, so keep reading.

















The next project of hers that caught my eye was a recycling project for the Avondale Forest Park in County Wicklow, Ireland. Yates: "With a one-inch chisel I carved a mural sixteen feet long and five feet high into the 42-ton beech tree that had been planted around 1750 and had died of old age. Even though the park had cut it down it was still ten feet tall; the project took me two months." You can read about her time in Ireland, where she met a good number of Irish celebs, here.














The whimsy of some of the work Yates did as an artist-in-residence at women's retreat Grailville, in Loveland, Ohio, is also fun. It would be pretty magical to be hiking along and come across this.












The "elf house" below, which was part of a project she did to recycle a lot of dead wood into artwork for a national park, was also cute. FYI, when I did a google search for Yates, I was directed to an interesting site (whose search function didn't work so I couldn't actually search for Yates). It's a dealer for sculptors; when you're on the site click on "wood" or just go here. I thought the work of Roberta Daar (a message may pop up saying there is no such site but just wait a few seconds and it will take you there, or at least, that's how it worked for me) and J.Mac looked interesting--Daar's is the white sculpture.



No comments: