The Privet Sculpture Project: Cutting Research

This is the edge of a native grass field that has never been plowed. It is slowly being overrun but a tidal wave of privet.

Anne Albagli and I went out to La Reunion Tx today. It was again damp, muddy and slick, but after whacking away at privet for an hour, the cold damp didn't feel so bad.

I brought along a cornucopia of saws, hedge clippers, and hatchets to test out. Branch trimmers work the best for anything smaller than an inch in diameter. Bigger than that you need a pull saw. Those come in lots of shapes and teeth counts. Lots of teeth seem to work the best. The privet is to wiggly for a standard push saw or an axe to efficiently cut lots of privet. I did notice areas where people had used a chainsaw. Agin the wiggliness of the branches resulted in heavily splinter stumps.

Art in the District 2010: posting on Art Seek

Posted a little blurb about the Art In The District 2010 art fair on Art and Seek. Just hoping to get the word out a bit more.

I really feel like the local/Texas media coverage for this art fair and the Dallas Art Fair, which by the way ran full page adds in Art in America and Art News for the last two months, was severely lacking. After the grand opening events for the two new performance centers in the Dallas Arts District a few months ago, you would think having 56 nationally recognized galleries set up camp across the street from the DMA would cause some buzz with the Art District crowd...

Dallas Art Fair posting on Art & Seek

I just posted an article about the second annual Dallas Art Fair on Art and Seek, click here. I am heading down there tomorrow to hopefully load up my eyeballs on some hot relevant artwork. Then I'll pop over to the new Art In The District 2010 art fair. Perhaps if I am lucky I will OD on art.

Make Space: Installation meet up at La Reunion TX

Old road almost swallowed up by privet

A good portion of the artists for this years Make Space: Installation met up at La Reunion Tx to scout out locations and inspirations for their installation projects. It was thick with slippery mud but other wise a very nice day.

Sarah Jane introduced me to Shreyas Krishnan, who describes himself as an ecologist with an interest in how invasive plants effect the natural evolution of amphibians and retiles. Of course I was very happy to hear about the invasive plant interest. I am hoping to include some of his knowledge in the documentation on the Privet Sculpture Project.

Two of the other artists, Anne Albagli and Nicle Cullum Horn are using privet in some form in their installations, so I'll be posting about some of their experiences here, too.

SculptCAD Rapid Artists role call

Here are the links to the artists that are involved in the SculpCAD Rapid Artist Program being sponsored by SculpCAD. Nancy selected a group of artists that work in a wide range of styles, mediums and disciplines to see what artists would do with a 3-D computer sculpting tool that is normally used by draftsmen to design medical implants and consumer good like tennis shoes.

• Brad Ford Smith
  
• Dave VanNess
  
• Jay Sullivan
  
• Erica Larkin
  
• Heather Ezell
  
• Ginger Fox
  
• Heather Gorham
  
• Katherine Batiste
  
• Mark Grote
  
• Shawn Smith
  
• Tom Lauerman
  
• Bert Scherbarth
  
• Nancy Hairston
  
• Shane Pennington

More Local Privet Problems

Seems like as soon as I submitted my Privet Sculpture proposal to La Reunion privet started coming out of my ears.

Lots of people like Shreyas Krishnan and organizations like the Texas Master Naturalists are very passionate about privet. Shreyas sent in this link to an article in the Dallas Morning News about the problems of removing privet from the Great Trinity Forest, (video by Scott Miller) Texas Invasives.org is actually creating a map that tracks the spread of privet across Texas.

A Duck made in the world of SculptCad

We had our first SculptCad Rapid Artists meeting today. We all introduced ourselves and commented on how our first tutorial projects were going, Note the duck pictured above. I'll post the links to all the participating artists in the next post.