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Visit Sertoma Arts Center for their March Gallery exhibits on display from March 1 through March 31. Featured artworks include photographs by the Carolina Nature Photographers Association, jewelry by Betty McKim and Hannah Weaver, and installation pieces by Ayla Gizlice and Jan-Ru Wan.
Visit Sertoma Arts Center
- Normal operating hours have resumed with reduced capacity. Please call ahead at 919-996-2329 to confirm gallery spaces are available for viewing. Sertoma Arts Center is open:
- Monday-Thursday, 9 a.m. - 10 p.m.
- Friday, 9 a.m. - 1 p.m.
- Saturday, 10 a.m. - 5 p.m.
- Sunday, 12 p.m. - 5p.m.
- Please review our "Know Before You Go" information
Artwork Statement
WHEN
2019-2022
Ceramics, photographs, survey tape, plants, soil, fungus, bacteria, algae, protozoa, mites, insects
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft, warm animal of your body
Love what it loves.
- “Wild Geese”, Mary Oliver
WHEN began during a “Text in Art” class at the Penland School of Crafts in the summer of 2019. I had recently completed a body of work that involved studying and representing the fish kill events in the Jordan Lake watershed and was deeply saddened by the effect of human assertion over our ecosystems. The idea of species hierarchies, or rather, the opposition thereof, seemed to provide hope. I reasoned that if we framed our bodies as “animal bodies”, fragile, mortal, and interconnected, with needs and desires that sometimes contradict, our relationship to ourselves, each other, and our ecosystem would fundamentally shift.
With the generous knowledge and assistance of Johnny Randall, the ceramic letters were installed in the ground at Mason Farm Biological Reserve from September 2021 through March 2022. The letter-shaped slab boxes were filled with soil and planted with a variety of native grasses and wildflowers. The plot was regularly documented but minimally intervened upon during the duration of the installation. Over time the sparse, minute blades of grass were choked out by bushy weeds. Or are the plants weeds at all? After all, this distinction suggests undesirability, as determined by a human mediator. Perhaps they are merely the resourceful winners of a process of natural selection.