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Cindy Stockton Moore |
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CFEVA's Art in the Open - May 2022 |
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Art in the Open is hosted by CFEVA in partnership with Fairmount Water Works (FWW).
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During Art in the Open 2022, I worked with handmade watercolors –made from natural, locally foraged material–to paint short animations on site. Grapevine charcoal, acorn caps, walnut hulls, and river water were gathered and shared alongside the resulting inks, exploring the tactile process of extracting color and underscoring the connection to the landscape.  Field studies  |
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I gathered specimens from a sample site along the Schuylkill, where I was set up for three days. Over the course of the event I created a small works on paper and ephemera. These paintings were animated directly on the ground with a portable copy stand, a technique I call sottobosco, referencing both undergrowth and a subgenre of historial still-life. |
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I also set up a small interactive table where visitors could test handmade inks/pigments with modifiers - watching the color shift alongside the pH balance. Here Iona plays with black bean ink and lemon juice, alongside some sun-processed hibiscus and marigold inks. | ||||||||
The palette I used for the field studies consisted of artist-made charcoal (porcelain berry vines), goldenrod and pokeweed, made into watercolor pan color with the addition of local honey. |
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Some paintings were turned into short stop-motion animations directly on site. |
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For more complex movements - like those of the wild-life that visited me, I've taken back into the studio to draw. Like the material studies on-site, these studio animations are painted on the backside of ledger pages from my installation at Eastern State Penitentiary. Each year, I save the used and handled pages when refreshing the installation. In conjunction with the found natural pigments, this reuse reflects my interest in low waste, low impact art practices. |
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My thanks to everyone who came out on this hot, hot weekend. I am especially grateful to the CFEVA staff and volunteers, who supplied us with cold water, good eats, unlimited support and great company throughout the weekend. The prolonged access to this well-loved, historically significant, and layered public site was inspiring, as were the many conversations with attendees and passerbys. I thoroughly enjoyed my time on the river and look forward to sharing the finished project in Spring 2023 at The Schuylkill Center for Environmental Education. |
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