Catherine Bell Smith

Sunday, September 11, 2011

Rose Mallow Series, Hail Mary

It is important to contemplate the mysteries

and remember that

when action fails, there is only prayer

beads that don't slide

smoothly through these fingers

mother

In May, 2011, I was proud to exhibit this piece as well as Sycamore Series, Halo with Mother Artists at Work at the Concourse Gallery in Upper Arlington, Ohio. You can read a review of the exhibit here.

Rose Mallow Series, Hail Mary

Copper mesh, wire, wood, Honeylocust thorns,

and plastic glow-in-the-dark figurines

12' x 6' x 2'


(detail)

Rural Routes (not your traditional landscape) Exhibition featuring works by Claire E Smith and Catherine Bell Smith

This exhibition at the Ohio Art League Gallery with Claire E. Smith took place last April. The show consisted of lithographs, drawings, and three large sculptures. The series of lithographs and the sculpture "Black Angus" are the creations of Claire Smith and can be viewed here. The drawings, Sentinels of Route 68, and the sculptures, Reliquaries and Watershed are mine. The opening was Thursday, April 7 and it was packed with friends and family from Columbus, Cleveland, Wausau, and Chicago. Their support was overwhelming.


Sentinels on Route 68 I, II, III, IV Charcoal on rag paper 53" x 24"

Reliquaries

Hardware cloth, screen, steel, fountain grass seeds

3' x 10' x 14'

Reliquaries (detail)

Milkweed Series

Longhorns (Chocolate Pecans & Caramel)

2011

Chocolate box, paper, mesh and milkweed seeds

15" x 12"

a submission for Eat, Drink and be Merry

Rural Routes (not your traditional landscape)

An installation about impressions, memory, distances, and place and the route that connects them.

Watershed (detail)

2011

4' x 8' x 35'

Fountain grass, wire mesh, steel columns

In April, I am privileged to exhibit at the Ohio Art League Gallery with Claire E. Smith. The show will consist of lithographs, drawings and three large sculptures creating the installation, Rural Routes (not your traditional landscape). The opening is Thursday, April 7 from 6:00 to 9:00 pm. The location is 1552 North High Street Columbus, OH 43201-1121.The exhibition will run from April 7 through April 29.

Tuesday, January 4, 2011

Rural Routes, Mystery Tour

The Rural Routes Series is inspired by the long, repeated trips along 71 between Columbus and Cleveland. Driving at high speed through a landscape in order to arrive at a destination only allows glimpses of the whole picture. Memory strings those images together, shifting size, losing detail, overlapping structures, collapsing distances. A thread develops and the countryside that separated two places becomes the route that connects two homes. And what you call home begins to include those spaces between.

Mystery Tour, Route 161

Charcoal, copper wire and hickory nut shells

1-14, 13" x 8" 15-20, 6" x 6"

November 2010

Tuesday, October 5, 2010

Sycamore Series

The Sycamore tree, belonging to Earth’s oldest clan of trees, Planataceae, presides regally over every landscape it graces. Look out over winter’s bone yard when the sky is this planet’s deepest blue and linger on the pristine white branches of these iconic giants.

The bark of all trees must yield to a growing trunk but the Sycamore invites the world to witness its growth as its outer layers, intractable and dusty with age, split and spall in great irregular masses. This bark, like shed skin or old beliefs or lessons learned, settles on the ground at the base of each mammoth; proof in the form of a disappearing halo, that life means growth--painful, messy, necessary.