Artists Find The New

Sheila Kaczmarek’s English Sycamore grabs the eye as soon as you enter City Gallery on Upper State Street. Viewed one way, it appears almost as if it could move, like a mobile. Viewed another, it’s possible to imagine it’s growing out of the wall. Its organic forms add up, fully, to an enveloping composition — and it’s possible to imagine it could have kept growing, or that the pod in the middle of it might hatch. That sense of completeness and open possibility isn’t just part of the finished piece, but also is present in the way it’s made.

English Sycamore is part of ​“Small Faces and Shadows,” a show of work by Kaczmarek and artist Jane Harris running now at City Gallery through June 27.

“I found this branch on the street and I liked it, but wasn’t sure how it would fit in,” Kaczmarek said of the genesis of English Sycamore. She was on a walk with her husband near their house in Guilford, where she also has her studio. Then, on the same walk, she came across another branch that seemed to work artistically with the first. ​“My husband carried home the big branch and I carried home the smaller one.”

Kaczmarek originally planned to incorporate pieces of pottery she’d made into the branches, but when she tried it, she was unimpressed; the clay pieces looked like ​“Christmas decorations.” A colleague who also works with clay saw the branches together and said, ​“you should put a big pod in there,” Kaczmarek related. A clay pod would have been too heavy, but one she made from papier-mâché did the trick; it fit among the twists and turns of the branches ​“like it was meant to be.”

English Sycamore was among the last pieces Kaczmarek made for the show, in March. The oldest dates from the previous March; chronologically, the artwork constitutes ​“my quarantine things,” Kaczmarek said, but she doesn’t think of them as being about being quarantined. They are the simply the things she made when, in a year with more isolation, but also fewer obligations, she got a lot of work done.

A series of pieces in the show have a painterly quality to them but actually involve ​“no paint at all,” Kaczmarek said. She used ink, silk tissue, and paper to achieve the colorful effects — all things she already had in her studio. ​“I wanted to keep it transparent,” she said of the quality she was aiming for.

That sense of transparency carried over to another set of pieces that Kaczmarek said came out of ​“thinking of looking through seawater and seeing rocks and boulders” on the ocean floor below. She thought specifically of the water in the Bay of Fundy, in Nova Scotia, or the water off Cape Cod. ​“The water there is clear,” she said. The three-dimensional elements in the pieces are fragments of clay pieces she had made a few years ago that had broken. She’d saved the pieces and now found a place for them. ​“I throw on everything,” she said.

Kaczamarek’s artmaking process is more about discovery than planning. It’s about starting from one point, taking a couple steps, seeing what happens, and moving from there. Some of the pieces in the show are built from paper Kaczmarek made outside. Leaves that fell on the pulp while it was still drying became part of the piece, as did fragments of a paper wasp nest that she found under her deck. The holes in the paper are what ​“just happened” while she was making it; it wasn’t necessary to try to fix them. The use of paper, for Kaczmarek, ties the pieces to the pod among the branches in the first piece.

Kaczmarek allows for discovery even working with clay — which requires some planning. The pieces in the show were pit-fired, in which ​“you make a pit with sawdust, seaweed, dog food, and chemicals” and ​“you get all these spots and marks” on the pieces. In the case of one of the heads in the show ​“when he was fired, the face blew off, and I kind of liked it.” She pieced it back together without trying to hide what had happened.

Kaczmarek’s approach to making art, she said, was influenced by the group of collaborators she worked with for many years — and a few of whom, (Caroline Chandler and Jane Harris) she founded City Gallery with. As they passed a piece among them to work on it together, she said, ​“the most important thing is that you had to let the piece speak to you — not have any ego or ideas about it.” The three founders shared a show at City Gallery in February 2020. In her own artmaking, Kaczmarek’s approach means things that might feel like setbacks or problems to some artists are more like opportunities for a piece of art to move in a different direction. The only real issue is knowing when it’s done, and for that, she relies on colleagues as much as her own intuition.

One of those colleagues is fellow City Gallery co-founder Jane Harris, also showing at the gallery this month. Now in her 90s, Harris was a graphic designer by trade, working at magazines including Harper’s. As she moved away from strictly commercial work and into artmaking, her approach became more abstract. Now, with decades of artmaking behind them, Kaczmarek and Harris are both still questing, moving, reacting — taking the creation of each piece a step at a time, listening to what it needs, and by that process, finding something new.

“Small Faces and Shadows” runs at City Gallery, 994 State St., through June 27. Visit the gallery’s website for hours and more information.