Artist Meg Bloom Finds Response In Persistence

Artist Meg Bloom looked over the pieces in ​“Buried in the Bones,” her new show at City Gallery on Upper State Street, running now through Feb. 28. ​“I love rotted trees and dead flowers,” she said. ​“I’m always interested in that, things decaying and falling apart, but with a touch of life in there.” If it sounds like she’s responding to current events, she is. But it’s also a statement about the way the New Haven-based artist has been doing art for decades.

Bloom made all the pieces in the show in the past two years, and most in the last year. ​“This is my response to the enormous loss and pain and devastation — a response to the crises in our environment, our climate, the loss of human life, to the tragic destruction and violations as a result of racism, poverty, cruelty, and discrimination,” she wrote in an accompanying statement. ​“The work reflects my constant state of anxiety and most sadly, my impotence to respond adequately to the ​‘everything.’”

“What was different was the relentlessness of the last few years,” Bloom said in an interview. ​“It was impossible not to react.” One piece is about the California wildfires. Another is an homage to Ruth Bader Ginsberg. But on the other hand, she said, ​“I always make art.” The pieces in the show are part of a much longer-term practice, slowly germinating and growing. That practice — and the lesson embedded in it — are part of what makes Bloom’s response so meaningful.

Bloom created ​“Tree of Life” in response to the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting of 2018; she began it not long after the shooting happened. But, she said, she didn’t truly finish it until ​“last week,” just before her show opened.

The spine of ​“Tree of Life” is ​“a piece of driftwood someone had given to me years ago,” Bloom said. She began to work with the driftwood, incorporating paper she’d made as well as paper packing material, following her intuition. ​“When I start to create something, there’s a natural tension,” she said. ​“Sometimes it resolves, and sometimes you can’t get it to resolve.”

“Tree of Life” took a long time to resolve as Bloom returned to the piece to work on it. ​“For a little while I had all sorts of things sticking out of it,” she said, including selections from ​“a collection of dead leaves – I’m the only one who would think they were beautiful,” she said with a laugh. ​“I know what I’m doing up to a point, and then the art speaks to me, telling me where to go.” As she continued to work on ​“Tree of Life,” she said, ​“I took things out a million times.”

Then, a week and a half ago, there was a happy accident. ​“It fell over,” Bloom said, and at its new angle, ​“it was doing something interesting.” She wanted it standing upright, but the new perspective gave her another idea, to add another piece of wood she had. ​“I thought it would work, and it did,” she said. ​“I don’t know how to articulate what it is that says that it’s right.” She just knew that it was.

There is something satisfying in the fact that Bloom’s artistic practice of patiently following her intuition yields sculptures that mirror forms found in nature. Her pieces look less like they’re made and more like they’re grown — which, in a few different ways, isn’t far from the truth.

“I walk every day. If I see something that talks to me, I bring it home,” Bloom said. That includes pieces of wood and stems from black walnut trees, which have found their way into several of the pieces in the show. ​“I hunt for them because there aren’t that many of them,” she said. But most of the pieces also employ paper that Bloom makes from kozo and abaca fibers. She got into papermaking as an ingredient for sculpture after ​“I had this wonderful guided walk in the woods” several years ago, Bloom said. The trip had a beaver pond as its destination, and the woods were wet. She came across a piece of wood that ​“had totally separated” with moisture, ​“so you could see the layers that look like paper.” Bloom recalled that she had a papermaking friend, Jennifer Davies, who could possibly teach her how to make paper that she might use in her sculptures. It opened up new possibilities for her art.

“I could get forms in a way that I used to get in clay, but you can’t get forms as big as this without casting,” Bloom said. In the course of her career, Bloom had moved from clay to fabric to paper. ​“The more you work with something, the more you figure out how to get the forms you want,” she said.

And the forms Bloom wants are redolent of natural forms — sea creatures, mushrooms, beehives, plant life — without being representational of them. ​“Almost all of my work is referential to nature,” she said. ​“I have always been drawn to cocoons and twisted trees. I’ve always been interested in transience, how things change and deteriorate and grow again.” Because, she said, that cycle of decay and rebirth, of forms changing and falling away and growing again — ​“that is life.” From that simple statement, Bloom has been able to create art for years, even in these trying times. It’s a lesson of how to engender an abiding strength, and persist, that goes beyond art.