In the Blossoms' Shade, window installation, June 2012

Day 01

In the Blossoms' Shade is an art installation and collaborative project about nature by Katherine Anderson and Pat Smith. First in a series of Gallery window installation pieces.

Katherine Anderson is a Seattle artist with a background in landscape architecture.  She will be working with natural materials.  Pat Smith is a CT sculptor.  She will be working in porcelain.  Together they will create an intrinsic work of art reflective of Basho poetry and Wabi Sabi aesthetics.  This is the first in The Lori Warner Studio/Gallery's series of window installations by invited artists.

“Less often, things wabi-sabi can come in the light, almost pastel colors associated with a recent emergence from nothingness. Like the off-whites of unbleached cotton, hemp, and recycled paper. The silver rusts of new saplings and sprouts. The green-browns of tumescent buds.”

Exhibition statement:

A branch foraged becomes a natural chandelier above Pat Smith’s wave bowls. Flowers having just emerged from seeming nothingness hang from the chandelier. As time progresses, the petals will become fragile and papery, drying and perhaps falling. The bowls with their undulating edges and open form will receive these suggestions of the ebb and flow of nature.

Above the bowls, the already pastel colors of the flowers will fade, and the petals will shrivel. The relatively quick transformation of the flowers from life to death harkens the distant future of the bowls. Someday, they will break, shatter and transform. In the meantime, the bowls in their wave form already suggest movement and flow, in opposition to things standing still.

The purity of the porcelain and the transparent and diminishing colors of the flowers capture this feeling of things coming into and out of existence, out of Winter, emerging in Spring, dying beautifully through the Summer. Together, Katherine Anderson’s floral chandelier and Pat Smith’s bowls embrace this process, a sense of the ephemeral, even as the bowls sit solidly on the bench, and the branch hangs sturdily above.