Spring News
The real hero this spring at Lost and Found Lab is the surrounding landscape. We are watching plantings roar to life that were put into the ground last fall. They are already imbuing a palpable spirit of this place which we will savor for years to come. Thanks to the creative vision of local landscape designer Vasilka Bukov and her team, things are truly rising to the surface.
This Spring, the Lab welcomed our inaugural AIR Annie Weatherwax back to host a day-long writing/drawing workshop entitled Creative Cartography. Participants were led through a range of collaborative writing and drawing exercises exploring the connection between language and art. The studio, gallery space and surrounding landscape served as an inspired nexus of light, silence and nature--a comforting spot to unplug, ponder and create.
Our next resident artist arrives this month. Photographer Marion Belanger's work focuses on the cultural landscape, where geology and the built environment intersect; where shifting identities of place and boundaries are in flux. A teacher at both the Hartford Art School and Wesleyan University, she has authored Rift/Fault (Radius Books, 2016), and Everglades: Outside and Within (Center for American Places at Columbia College Chicago, 2009).
Belanger earned a M.F.A. from the Yale University School of Art and recently collaborated on a permanent installation with Martha Lewis at the Connecticut Agricultural Experimental Station. Her work is held in numerous collections including the National Gallery for Art, the New Orleans Museum of Art, the Library of Congress, and both the Yale University Art Gallery and the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. We are very much looking forward to hosting Marion at the Lab and learning more about her work past, present and future.
Our short break between residencies this Spring has provided time for visits with a variety of collaborators here at the Lab. Sally Williams, our team member hailing from New Zealand, joined us this month to present the documentary film Stevenson Lost and Found at the Century Association, along with Josie Merck, New Yorker cartoonist Roz Chast and film critic Molly Haskell. We love having Sally on this side of the globe for endless creative brainstorming, loud laughs, thoughtful planning, and all around good cheer.
Cartoon by Roz Chast
An illustration from Mud Flat Spring, 1999, by James Stevenson