Shelburne Farms, Contemporary Pastoralism, process
nancy milliken
Video about process for Windscape
Video about process for Windscape

The Lighthouse

The Lighthouse, a new site-specific light and natural material installationwill be on view from May to October 2013 in Boston's Christian Science Plaza as a part of the Boston Sculptors Gallery's group show, Convergence,co-sponsored by The First Church of Christ, Scientist. My 70-foot tall wool and sailcloth sculpture will enliven the vast concrete plaza with organic materials responsive to wind and be dramatically lit at night by internal lighting elements. More than two dozen public art installations from Boston Sculptors Gallery members will be on display at the Plaza to draw attention to contemporary visual art and promote its prominent place in the life of the city.

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© The First Church of Christ, Scientist. Used with permission. (aerial view of installation site) 

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© The First Church of Christ, Scientist. Used with permission. (view of installation site near the reflecting pool)

This dynamic installation will employ scaffolding to surround an existing lightbox that depicts images of children. The scaffolding creates an industrial platform for me to weave 150 feet of raw wool collected from New England sheep farms. The flowing, airy and textural natural materials will provide a contrast to the surrounding static concrete and steel buildings. This mixture of urban and rural materials, The Lighthouse, is full of metaphor: protection, home, community, comfort.

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This contemporary sculpture is my gift to the city of Boston. No money will be made in the sale of the temporary installation, and for this, I will need to raise $10,000 to install and rent scaffolding for six months. Your contribution will, quite literally, provide the foundation of this monumental and dynamic sculpture. In collaboration with The Christian Science Plaza, we have acquired all the required city permits and permissions for the installation. It is all-systems-go right now in the studio; wool is being sheared and collected from local farms, college interns are helping weave and felt in the studio and the smell of lanolin is in the air! 

To follow the development of the process of making The Lighthouse, please visit the studio blog, subscribe to get RSS feeds, or sign up for periodic email updates on the home page.

 Please visit http://www.usaprojects.org/project/the_lighthouse to learn more and to donate.

I greatly appreciate your contribution.

Thank you,

Nancy

the village

Something interesting happens when you state your intention to bring contemporary public art to a large city landmark such as The Christian Science Plaza. The village gathers. And you gather the village.  During the ground work for collecting the vast amount of wool needed for The Lighthouse, I have met shearer Andy Rice and other New England sheep farm owners who are insightful and offer great advice. Friends such as, actress Christine Stevens offers video and voice over for a fundraising campaign, and educator and farmer Nicki Robb spends an afternoon weaving and contemplating the human/animal connection. Interns from colleges are coming in to work and the studio is filling with the smell of lanolin. Family members are helping with material choices, Marci Caplis helps with editing documents, and artist Chris Nelson bounces ideas to help me see clearer the vision for a sculpture that has taken on a life of its own. Architect Andrew St. John and Engineer George Sherwood help with structural elements; all of this under the guidance of a true mentor, artist Mac Dewart.

Artists are small entrepreneurs conducting on any given day the publicity, fundraising, ordering of materials, meeting with the suppliers, getting permissions, organizing and training help, meeting with architects and designing and creating the actual sculpture. The research and literature read at night to instill deeper ideas is a bonus and a favorite part of my job, but mostly it is the village that I love. Asking for help in my first monumental urban public art sculpture is the first step to actualize this dream.

addendum to Peace Comes Slowly Now

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Every once in a while I will get images from viewers who witness work that has survived winter storms. This is when the changes in the piece speak the loudest about the materials I use and why I use them. The transformations, such as tendrils of wool teased out, or gaping holes left from the howling wind, are testimony to the effects of time on our own lives. The wool looks heavy and bedraggled when it is raining, much like how we feel when it is raining. On sunny and windy days wool is alive and dancing on the breeze. Many thanks to Marlboro College for the images.

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CONVERGENCE: BOSTON SCULPTORS GALLERY EXHIBITS AT THE CHRISTIAN SCIENCE PLAZA

I am pleased to have been selected to be a part of the Boston Sculptors Gallery exhibit at the Christian Science Plaza from May through November 2013.  Still in the design phase, my site specific installation will be employing traditional materials of wool, sailcloth, steel and light, towering 66 feet tall. To see more information and view the strong group of established artists participating, please visit Convergence

Off to Marlboro College

Next week I will be an artist-in-residence at Marlboro College in Vermont, where I will be working with students on a sculpture combining the materials cobb, wool and limestone. The form is a deconstructed spire that will perch on a knoll overlooking the western hills. At this time of year, when the leaves are down, spires of churches are visible and prominent. These tall forms are an intricate part of the New England landscape and I am looking forward to cobbing and weaving with the engaged students of Marlboro College.

 Meanwhile, the Amherst Biennial installation, I Will Arise and Go Now, has been both growing and diminishing with all the rain we have been having. The head has fallen off and been built back up several times, sometimes with viewer participation. I love coming to the figures in the morning and find an adjustment that a visitor has made. Above is an image of the newest figure who will be sowing seeds. Notice the cows in the distance.

 

New Studio

Nancy Winship Milliken Studios has moved to Eastworks, in Easthampton, MA. Big windows, high ceilings and most importantly, heat for the winter! BMW Ironworks is downstairs and wonderful video and installation artist Sarah Bliss is down the hall. How lucky am I? Plus it is a bonus day of setting up studio, enjoying the benefits of high speed internet, and knowing I have space now to store sculpture in the studio back at home.


cobb and honey

The rain has been a challenge for building cobb figures in the woods.  The milking man has not set and is collapsing in on himself. You can see the support stick coming through his arm.  Soon he will be solid enough so I can start carving away cobb and molding him.

 

 

And in the studio when it is raining, the honey is pouring. Here is an acrylic and honey sculpture getting filled.

 

I Will Arise and Go Now

 

 I Will Arise and Go Now, has been selected to be a part of the 2012 Amherst, Biennial. This site-specific performance sculpture is staged on the transitional edge of farmland and forest at The Hitchcock Center in Amherst, MA.  The life-size cobb (earth, sand, hay, manure) sculptures of farmers performing farm chores, will transition in the elements, and deteriorate from weather, as I build them up from the earth. The choice of representing farm chores reflects the lost skill of collecting eggs, handmilking cows, or spreading seed.  It represents the deep rooted work of generations farming the New England landscape.  Cobb is an ancient building material used to make housing or structures. Making and using cobb is a skill that I am learning for this installation. Here is a snippet of video from the frst day.

 

 

The title, I Will Arise and Go Now, comes from a line in W.B. Yeats poem:

The Lake Isle of Innisfree

 

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,

And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:

Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee;

And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

 

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,

Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;

There midnight's all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,

And evening full of the linnet's wings.

 

I will arise and go now, for always night and day

I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;

While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,

I hear it in the deep heart's core.

 

 

William Butler Yeats

 

 

Invested Landscape Show

The Invested Landscape show at the Nave Gallery in Somerville, MA is getting installed this weekend.  It is a show of a variety of artists who are expressing their relationship with landscape.  The following is our curatorial statement.

 

The artists presented in Invested Landscape wield a wide variety of methods and aesthetics for investigating the human/landscape relationship. For centuries artists have interacted and interpreted the great outdoors, capturing the light in their surrounding village or recording exotic vistas, real or imagined, from distant lands. Recently, this interaction has become more direct, digging up the earth for land art that can only be seen from above. In this exhibit, urban and rural landscapes, both near and far, familiar and unfamiliar, are altered and deconstructed to represent or interpret our relationship with place. 

 Artist Jane Lincoln abstracts the ever-elusive color and light on the bogs of Provincetown in into vertical signifiers in her paintings. In contrast, Rimas Simaitis constructs a self-contained exploration vehicle and videotapes his exploration of a suddenly alien landscape. Sarah Bliss, in Animal, Vegetable, Mineral collects information through interviews, images and found objects, that helps her define a foreign landscape she encountered during her residency in Cill Rialaig, County Kerry, Ireland. Each artist invests the landscape with a personal interpretation of place and affect. Gathered here is a group of works that deconstruct the understanding of what landscape is. Tivy's postcards, Ransom's pinhole cameras, Johnson's descriptive snippets—they're all landscapes, but put through a diffracting lens.

Katie Jurkiewicz, Nancy Winship Milliken, Ted Ollier

 

 

contact: nancy@nancymilliken.com