Forces of Nature: Renwick Invitational 2020

"Forces of Nature: Renwick Invitational 2020 features four remarkable artists who use materials of the earth-indigo, glass, paper, metal-to explore our relationship with nature and help us understand our place in a world increasingly chaotic and divorced from our physical landscape. Textile artist Rowland Ricketts farms his own indigo, beginning his practice not with dyeing or weaving cloth but with planting seeds. Many of his works incorporate participation from non-artists and strategic exposure of cloth to light, revealing relationships between nature, people, and the passage of time. Lauren Fensterstock draws on the natural world to find metaphors that get at the root of why we do what we do. In a site-specific installation for the Renwick, Fensterstock transforms the galleries with meticulously crafted comets and clouds, encrusted in baroque patterns of obsidian and Bohemian cut glass, that hover above a seductive yet ominous landscape. Debora Moore's work in glass is deeply informed by her own study of nature, having traversed the globe in search of flora, mainly orchids, in situ. Her installation of four human-size flowering glass trees are evocative both for their remarkable detail and beauty and for their ability to elicit deep emotion. Timothy Horn, best known for extravagant wall pieces made from cast metals, crystal, and blown and mirrored glass, emphasizes our complicated relationship with nature by taking inspiration from both highly stylized seventeenth-century jewelry patterns and nineteenth-century studies of natural forms. Throughout the essays, authors Emily Zilber, Nora Atkinson, and Stefano Catalani explore questions not just at the core of craft, but vital to our present moment. They reveal how each artist uses nature as a guide, partner, adversary, ward, and inspiration. Begun in 2000, the Renwick Invitational is a biennial series designed to celebrate artists deserving of wider recognition. Forces of Nature is the ninth installment in the series. Other titles in the Renwick Invitational series include Disrupting Craft (2018), Visions and Revisions (2016), History in the Making (2011), and Staged Stories (2009)"-