Turning Truro into a crossroads for the arts, Provincetown Banner
(April 24, 2019)
This article in the Provincetown Banner on April 24, 2019 published an excellent narrative about each of the four artists in residence at Edgewood Farm in late April 2019. Original article located online here:
Photo by Provincetown Banner
Turning Truro into a crossroads for the arts
By Susan Blood / Banner Correspondent
Posted Apr 24, 2019 at 4:28 PM
photo of print edition
Just off Route 6 at 3 Edgewood Way but a world apart, Truro Center for the Arts at Castle Hill’s spring artists-in-residence program at Edgewood Farm is in full swing, as four visiting artists make the most of their two- to six-week stays on the Outer Cape. The public is invited to meet the artists, catch a glimpse of their new work, and scope out the largely restored Edgewood Farm compound today from 4 to 6 p.m.
Rachel Brask Hutchinson, who hails from East Providence, R.I., drove into Truro in a deluge, which was perfect for her. “I find myself, even when I’m driving, looking at color and how it gets distorted, and thinking I need to make a painting of that,” she says.
That view through her windshield may end up in a gallery in Rome, where her paintings of rainy moments are on exhibit with the work of an expressionist equestrian artist in a show called “Rains and Reins.” Brask is looking forward to learning encaustic technique in an upcoming workshop with Cherie Mittenthal, Castle Hill’s executive artistic director. “Since I deal with rain and drips, I want to explore using wax to do transparencies and layers,” she says. “It’s an experimental time, working with encaustic and Cherie.”
Martha Ferguson, who arrived in Truro (from Port Washington, N.Y.) at about the same time that Hutchinson did, has been thinking about where the ocean water she sees on the Cape has come from, and where it’s going. “It’s fascinating that something here that I touch has circumnavigated the globe, holding us together,” she says. “The world seems like it’s much smaller.”
She’s exploring these interconnected systems while sharing studio space with fellow resident Sarah Kain, who came here from Babylon, N.Y. “Working in a space with someone else indirectly influences what you’re doing,” Ferguson says. “It’s inspiring to have the energy of someone else working, even though the work itself is really different. I’ve been working on some sculptures I had abandoned that Sarah encouraged me to revisit.”
The studio space they share is Edgewood Farm’s print shop, where Kain has been working all month. Kain, who has done finishing work in the Provincetown sewing studio of Giardelli-Antonelli, is creating wearable art with fabric that she has collected from myriad countries and cultures. “I like combining different patterns, which some people might consider a clash,” she says.
In addition to creating scarves made from up to nine different fabrics, Kain collects funny and anti-establishment T-shirts and reworks them as elements of poetry in her dress and scarf designs. She even reworked old Castle Hill T-shirts into dresses that were auctioned off to help raise money for Edgewood Farm. In September, Kain heads off to teach French art and culture at the Académie Charpentier in Paris, where she will likely buy more fabric.
Like Kain, Patty Adams has been at Edgewood Farm since April 1. At her last show, Adams felt as if her work wasn’t reaching the viewer the way that she had hoped, so she is using her time at Edgewood Farm to reinvent the way she goes about making imagery. The new work will be based on landscapes from stories that people know, such as the pool of tears in “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.” She’s finding ways of using the fictional landscape while obscuring the original subject. “I would like to get the emotional impact of sitting in your own tears, trapped by a ring of animals,” she says.
Adams is not entirely sure how she will pull this off. “The residency allows you to make bad work,” she says, cheerfully. “It becomes an investigation into your own abilities and desires. Problems come up, and you let them, because you are more interested in what you find out along the way than the perfect outcome. That’s the fun I’m having here. And it is really fun.”
She also enjoys “trade talk” with the other residents. “Cherie has a gift for finding people who can offer things to each other,” she says. “There is a real exchange of possibilities that would not have happened elsewhere.”
But it’s not only the camaraderie that makes the residency so helpful. “I love being cut loose from my daily life,” she says. “It’s a heady, liberating feeling. Somehow it all connects to being able to make good work.”