Maine turning exhibition explores meaningful causes

“Turning It All Around: Turners in Collaborative Conversation,” opened in the Messler Gallery at the Center for Furniture Craftsmanship in Rockport, Maine, on Jan. 20 and will run through April 19. The exhibit features intricate works through collaborations by 19 artists from the United States, Canada, and abroad, exploring sentimental ideas in today’s world through sculpture in turned wood and mixed media.

The show’s curators are makers and teachers Beth Ireland, from St. Petersburg, Fla., and Kimberly Winkle, from Cookeville, Tenn. Ireland is lead instructor for the Center for Furniture Craftsmanship’s Turning Intensive, while Winkle is director and professor of Art at Tennessee Tech University.

“For this exhibition, Ireland and Winkle asked 19 premier wood artists to invite collaborators from outside their own areas of expertise to explore their mutual experiences of post-pandemic life by making objects together. The result is a visually compelling array of finely crafted objects that explore topics as distinct as war and resilience, healing, social media, gender and discrimination, the environment, and extinction,” the center said in a statement.

One installment includes “A New Beginning” by Yuri Kobayashi of Thomaston, Maine, and Daria Veligura of Kyiv, Ukraine. Veligura and her family are in the U.S. as Ukrainian refugees, having fled their home last February to remain safe. Consisting of small painted eggs derived from wood turnings, the pieces are designed to honor and represent an early Ukranian culture called the Trypil Kukuten, which formed 7,500 years ago on the territory of modern Ukraine and Romania in Europe, with two million people living on the land. While the culture lasted two-and-a-half centuries, very little is known about it, except for about 200 examples of Trypil Kukuten ceramics.

Another piece, “Heartwood”, by Liz Koerner and Krista Schoeing of Little Rock, Ark., is a vessel depicting a painted ash tree in the base to shed light on the loss of U.S. landscapes due to invasive species such as the Emerald Ash Borer and climate pressures.

For more, visit woodschool.org.

This article was originally published in the April 2023 issue.