Member News: Carol Taylor-Kearney

Hello-
Before it goes away, I wanted to invite you to the closing reception (on Sunday, October 4th from 2 - 4) for my Gnome Project (Gnomenculture) at the Carriage House at the Islip Art Museum. Gnomenculture is part of Projects '09, a residency and site specific installation project given yearly at the Carriage House of the Islip Museum. I feel very lucky to have had this opportunity and suggest that all my artist friends who think in terms of installation look into this, too.

Gnomenculture began for me from a visit to the Carriage House/Islip Museum when I found a gnome broken to bits in the parking lot. At first I wasn't sure if it was an installation (it was so perfectly distributed) or vandalism. After checking with the museum director, Mary Lou Cohallen, I photographed the debris and then collected it. This led me on an odessey of research both of gnomes and of the grounds and buildings of the Islip Museum and the Carriage House. The grounds there are lovely, sporting woodlands, a garden, historic buildings, even a lake with ducks, geese, and swans. This provided me with plenty of stuff to forage for installation materials. Research into the gnome including the Gnome Liberation Front, gnomes in literature (those "little people" in Rip van Winkle for example), and in modern culture (think Travelocity gnome and the gnome in the movie Amelie) provided other ideas. I restored the gnome (Art, is his name by-the-way) as an artist who recreates his own world via the Islip Museum for himself and other emboldened fellows.

Since many of you may not be available to see the exhibit, I am including some still shots. This cannot give you the full experience, but it may whet your appetite to envision more. Some details on materials-- there are close to 500 photographs, paper mache and clay gnomes, gnomes and small statuary collected from the local area, three reverse glass painted windows, hand-painted leaves, vines made of wire, and little scenarios involving the gnomes both in 3-d and pictures/collage. I hope that this is a little piece of whimsy that is as much fun to explore as it was to make.
I look forward to seeing or hearing from you!--Carol