Art of the Garden: Double Bloom Rebecca Hutchinson & Joan Snyder

“Hutchinson creates large-scale wall sculptures in mixed media that combines clay with Handmade paper. She uses harvested natural materials and recycles used domestic natural fiber individually as handmade paper in combination with clay.  She constructs wall sculpture and site-specific works  with hand built, dipped, layered blooms assembled through which one can see the process of growth, how blooms begin to expand and create form…

Snyder’s work, which spans over fifty years, also brings together non-traditional materials to the canvas, such as burlap, cheesecloth, dried flowers, poppy pods, papier-mâché, glitter, mud, and twigs.  Her process is in full view, spontaneous but methodically worked, with marks and strokes…Her [Snyder] work is personal and autobiographical, expressing a unique vocabulary that creates its own language…

Snyder and Hutchinson together bring a personal narrative to this show, drawing on combined decades of experimentation with earthly materials, and “whatever they could get their hands on,” according to Snyder. Hutchinson says her work is “charged on an ecological level, charged politically, and charged with gender.”  Their work is alive, complicated, exciting and has a shared but differing vision.”

– Curator Cherie Mittenthal