2025 Piccolo Spoleto Juried Art Exhibition

I have been remiss in posting to this blog, it has been quite a while! But I have remained active in creating and exhibiting art. Most recently I had a piece accepted to the Piccolo Spoleto juried show, beautifully installed in City Gallery, Charleston, South Carolina. The exhibit ran the duration of the annual Spoleto Festival, May 23 through June 8. The works were chosen from Southeastern artists by juror Zinnia Willits.
Spoleto festival brings top-notch performing artists from around the world to present everything from opera and theater to puppetry, jazz and bluegrass. There were several premiere productions. I was fortunate to see the opera "The Turn of the Screw", stunningly staged and performed by wonderful singers and the Festival Orchestra, and a fabulous modern dance performance by the NYC Jose Limon Company with the Spoleto Festival USA Chorus. An amazing hard-to-describe experience was the shadow-puppet play "The 4th Witch" by the Manual Cinema troupe out of Chicago. It told a WWI-set story about Macbeth and the horrors of war through the simple means of on-stage projectors, paper cut-outs and the silhouettes of live actors jumping in and out of scene with great precision. Hauntingly beautiful live music enhanced the mood. 
For my entry to the exhibit, I decided to complete an assemblage and sculpture piece that I had started a few years ago and set aside when I moved house. It is a complex piece and contains personal elements, such as some old family photos. I worked furiously on it for a month, to choose, arrange and install elements from my collection of pieces of shell, driftwood, found objects, small sculptures made from various clays, and the photos. I had previously sourced and cleaned up an antique wood type-setters tray for the matrix and had an acrylic cover made. One of the challenges was attaching the objects so they looked as if they were floating, using various epoxy glues and putties, wire and other materials. I call the piece "Chart for Decoding Dreams" and it is 16.5" x 32" x 1.5".