It Was a Busy Sabbatical

Ellen Kochansky, Executive Director

It Was a Busy Sabbatical

(Above:  Ellen Kochansky with her artwork at Clemson University's Lee Gallery.  This invitational exhibition was called Upstate 8: SC Fellowship Women and was part of the South Carolina Arts Commission's 50th anniversary.)

After five years of non-stop Rensing Center residency administration work, I was anointed by the board with a sabbatical.  Countless others have found their serene place here at Rensing, reframing their outlook and their work by watching the goats and the waterfall. I did too.  Since September 2017, the critical priorities have presented and arranged themselves into a new and clearer form, with my mother's needs, the opportunity to make new art, and some traveling to visit my friends and family taking center stage. Perspective, the reason we chose to look at life from the small village of Borseda in Italy, has appeared in Pickens. As those priorities became clearer, I remembered how artwork falls into place when we squint.  I call this VALUE JUDGMENT, and I've given this lecture often.  Here was my chance, in the nine month gestation period, to give the note to self!  

At a Penland funeral for the icon Paulus Berenson, old friends came through with just what I needed.  Bobby Kadis asked me, "How's that Rensing thing going?"  I said, "After five years and 84 residents from nine countries, I'm exhausted. I need a week at the beach!"  He said, "I can do that for you."  Nol Putnam, my mother, and I had a glorious rest.

 

The undercurrent is that Rensing's best and most compatible alumni and friends stayed in touch, and my choice to anoint a group of Rensing Fellows turned out to have been a good one.  These fellows were given first dibs on the single, summer session for 2018, and they all said "Yes!"

Many other wonderful things have happened including the return of Catherine Cross Tsintzos.  During Catherine's May 2017 residency, she planted indigo on the Rensing farm.  She returned for a harvest and dyeing celebration on Saturday, October 28th, teaching a sold-out workshop on growing South Carolina indigo, bundling, folding, clamping and exploring the vats of blue dye.There was an exhibit of examples, reading/study materials in the Rensing Library and a festive spread in the gallery space with celebratory snacks and glorious florals by board member Ron Few.

Participants worked hard all afternoon creating fabulous fabric!

Catherine returned to the Rensing Center on January 28th and 29th to teach "The Art of the Page", another wonderful workshop where so much creativity was unleashed.

Participants for these two workshops came from all over the country.  They contributed to the life and mission of the Rensing Center but also made their economic impression on the local community.  Many hope to return and bring friends, spouses, and other artistic types.  These were the most profitable workshops held at the Rensing Center and promised a new potential for us.

As the new summer session began in May, the Rensing Center partnered with EMRYS, a Greenville literary society, to host the winner of their chapbook award for the second year in a row.  Dr. Mary Moore, Professor Emerita in the English Department of Marshall University, was this year's winner.

On Monday, June 4th the Rensing Center unveiled Timshel/Thou Mayest, a new sculpture by Rensing Fellow Dr. Keith L. Andrews.

Dr. Keith L. Andrews says of his sculpture, "Human have always been uncertain of the relationship between our free will and the great forces that impinge on us.  In Genesis 4:5, Cain was told that he must meet sin (or was it disobedience or ignorance?) Depending on the translation of the Hebrew word timsel, Cain was either being commanded to overcome the challenge or was being reassured that he would confront it successfully.  In East of Eden by John Steinbeck, the translation from Hebrew is "Thou Mayest".

www.keithlandrews.com 

The Cocoon by Rensing Fellow art resident Susan Lenz

Susan Lenz

Columbia, South Carolina

June 2018

The Cocoon by Rensing Fellow art resident Susan Lenz

(Above:  One completed section of my fiber installation, The Cocoon, with my Bernina sewing machine in the foreground.  Click on any image in this post to enlarge.)

My name is Susan Lenz.  I'm a fiber and installation artist from Columbia, South Carolina and very happy to be back at the Rensing Center for a five-week art residency.  I was here for just three weeks during the summer of 2015.  At that time, I worked on several projects but this time is quite different!

(Above:  The Cocoon in progress inside the Rensing Center "Pottery", one of the accommodations here at the Rensing Center that functions as both studio and apartment.)

I sent a proposal asking for time and space in which to create a two-sided, fiber enclosure from an enormous stash of vintage household linens, antique garments, buttons, lace, and other collected textiles. I'm quite grateful by the acceptance of this proposal. 

 

I'm calling the installation The Cocoon.  It is being made on a specialized pipe assemblage system that is ordinarily used to create individual booths on a convention center floor.  The South Carolina Arts Commission awarded me a quarterly artist project grant to assist with the cost of this structure.  I got enough pipes to create up to a 20' x 20' cube.  The system is quite flexible though and various other, smaller dimensions will be possible as needed to future opportunities.

  

I envision this installation as a 21st century quilting bee without the strict demands of stitched perfection, pattern, or function for bedding.  The enclosure will become a fun, comfortable way to share common threads between people of all ages, races, and cultural backgrounds. 

From the beginning, I've wanted this fiber installation to do several things.  I wanted to have a place where a mother and child could thread a needle, fasten a button onto a piece of cloth or learn a basic running stitch. I wanted people of all ages to share stories of family members who quilted, stitched, made all the garments for their family or crocheted doilies for the house.  I also wanted to inspire others to DO SOMETHING with their treasured textiles.

I am most pleased that the Rensing Center will be hosting the first public viewing for The Cocoon in the Rensing Library on Thursday, July 12 from 6 - 8.  If in the area, please consider this your invitation!

As a regular blogger, I've been documenting this installation and am already receiving positive feedback from readers.  My posts to date include:

ARRIVAL at the Rensing Center

The First Week

A YoYo Couple of Days

Two Weeks Completed

Check back as I will put up at least one other post before the July 12th reception!

Rest and Rekindling

Vanessa Blakeslee

Winter Park, Florida

July 2017

Rest and Rekindling

On my first day weeding in the tomato beds, I made sure to be on constant lookout for snakes. I dislike snakes and always have, and South Carolina, is, after all, rattlesnake and copperhead country. But, turns out what struck and caused my hand to swell for five days was my upsetting a wasps’ nest—two sharply painful stings. Moral of the story is: don’t get too fixated on a suspected threat, because you might just overlook what is right in front of you. This was my first residency where I’d signed on for work exchange, and I have wanted to get more hands-on experience with gardening for a long time. What was the experience of taking on tasks in new surroundings, plus accomplishing my own writing, going to be like?  

While I took Benadryl and iced my hand, I wasn’t in optimal shape to write, especially to rethink the novel project I’d come here with or to revise the stories for my forthcoming collection. Was something telling me to first rest and reflect? Let go and roll with the punches, I told myself, and set off to explore. First the library, where I stumbled across several books that I’d been curious about for a while. I felt an urgent need to reconnect more deeply with myself, to grieve and finally accept the state of our planet as climate chaos and mass extinction unfolds, and I found the space to do that in my studio at Rensing.

Several times I brought along a book, hiked the path to the waterfall, and enjoyed the cooler temperatures at trail’s end. What better place to read The Hidden Life of Trees? Walking back, I looked at the mosses, fungi, and stumps anew, my view of the interconnected ecosystem transformed.  

The swelling in my hand subsided, and I carried on tending to “The Secret Garden,” as I dubbed the well-laid but overgrown upper garden. The scent of ripening tomatoes mixed with earth refreshed my senses, and soon enough, after a few mornings of gardening, I returned to my studio, washed up, and felt the creative urge reawaken. Sometimes I worked at my desk, but more often, and when the temperatures cooled off enough, I wrote on my back porch. And kept reading: The Way of the Shaman by Michael Harner, Gratitude by Oliver Sacks, Morningstar by Ann Hood. One day a fairly large creature crushed branches below; I crept over to the screen. A deer picked her way through the underbrush, eating leaves. I look up from my laptop and the cardinal and his mate fly from tree to tree. Late afternoon and into the night, the bullfrogs groan. We may not resemble one another, but we are all cousins—trees, birds, insects. Our DNA is more related than not; we emerged from stardust.

Here I revisited an older story of mine that I very much liked, drafted a new dystopian fiction and expanded another piece started earlier this year. Upon these pages you’ll find images of Rensing, from the Foxfire book on my shelf to the goats in the pasture. I have been struggling for much of this year with how to make art in a world that appears every day more ugly and insane—writing takes time to shape, even longer to publish and find its audience. Is there even a point? A visit to the nearby petroglyphs reminded me that humans have been making art for as long as we have been gathered around a fire in the wilderness, surrounded by many different threats, and will continue to do so. We make art because we are terrified and enthralled by the grand cosmic mystery, and because out of our lives we must make beauty, justice, and meaning. All we ever have is this moment.

There will be green beans, tomatoes, and figs to be gathered this week, and more weeds to be pulled, wasps to look out for, and snakes. There will be thunderstorms, rousing breezes. There will be conversation, cherry cobbler, and laughter. From my porch the sunlight strikes the leaves, bright green, and a blue butterfly dances. What else might make its imprint on my fiction, now, and after I leave? I’m ever grateful to the Rensing Center for the solitude, contemplation, and reconnection I’ve found here.   

-Vanessa Blakeslee

Portholes, Porches, Waterfall

Thomas Heise

Brooklyn, New York

July 2017

Portholes, Porches, Waterfalls

Three weeks ago, I arrived from Brooklyn, NY to the Rensing Center in rural Pickens, SC with the goal of finishing a draft of my novel, tentatively titled The Beautiful Ones. In a little less than two days, I’ll head back north with a completed draft of the manuscript and a thousand memories of the wonders that unfolded and revealed themselves to me while I was here.

Each morning for the first week, I looked out through the porthole window at my desk in the Guest House at the trees and climbing vines as if I were writing in a bathysphere lowered into the depths of the ocean. When it rained and water sluiced around the sides and down the concave window, I easily could imagine, as well, that I was sailing on a boat through the forest.

Eventually, I traded in the perspective of the window for the screened-in back porch. Since part of the Guest House is perched on a hillside, the porch is literally up in the trees. I could look up from my laptop at cardinals and butterflies lighting on the branches in front of me. This place is full of life and full of birds. In late June and early July, the days here are beautifully warm. Every few days a thunderstorm would roll in and the rain would fall so hard over the porch in a curtain that it was like writing from behind a waterfall. These “scenes of writing,” inspired by Rensing, have made their way into my book: they make a cameo in the novel.

The waterfalls were not just off my back porch. I discovered that the area is home to Twin Falls, a seventy-foot cataract (actually two of them) that is a short distance by car, but hidden away at the end of some winding mountain roads. Turn on your GPS, because there aren’t any signs. After getting lost for a bit, I eventually found the entrance to the trail up to the falls. A quick and easy hike and twenty minutes later, I was eating lunch near the rushing water and reading Werner Herzog’s Walking in Ice, his gripping and hallucinatory account of his trek on foot from Munich to Paris in early winter. Twin Falls seemed the perfect place to get swept up in Herzog’s thunderous prose.

I could go on about the magic of the place – from the simple pleasures of eating vegetables harvested that morning from Rensing’s garden, to the discoveries to be found at Pickens’s sprawling and completely amazing flea market, to the world’s two best goats whom I fed animal crackers daily, to the chanterelles that I foraged in the nearby woods, and – most especially – to the many enriching conversations I’ve had with the people who in their various ways are tirelessly contributing to Rensing’s ongoing experiment in art, culture, environmental consciousness, and fellowship. The South has always been a complex and fascinating part of the country that defies easy characterization. Coming here confirmed that for me again and again.

I found the Rensing Center, specifically, to be a place I could go into myself to do my work I came here to do and come back out of myself to reengage with the culture, nature, and people around me. I found it revitalizing to turn off the noise, the clatter and clamor of the rest of the world, for a time and sit outside and listen to the crickets electrify the air and watch the bright stars drift overhead.

Thomas Heise

Anthropocene

Artemis Herber

Washington, DC

June 2017

Anthropocene

Slowing down is the key to the pace of working at the Rensing Center. In this secluded and picturesque countryside in South Carolina one can find space and time to focus on the arts.  

A week ago I moved into a spacious former pottery studio that provides an ideal live-and-work space tucked away from busy cities and highways. Waking up in the morning, I’m drawn to my work desk with my first cup of coffee. When wired to my work, there is so much more time for experiments, explorations and process, without any time pressure. 

This is a place to connect with the natural environment through hikes to nearby creeks and state parks. Currently I'm exploring themes related to geology and deep time, and their entanglement with geopolitical issues. My research goes in two directions, on one side exploring actual sites, where deep time is revealed through washed out creeks, waterfalls and monumental rock formations, and on the other side digging into new publications and conversations about the Anthropocene. The Rensing Center is a perfect environment for my artistic searches and discoveries in both forms of exploration.

The organic farm on site allows residents to work in the garden and cook homegrown vegetables fresh from scratch. There’s never a starving artist here! The Rensing Center is a wholesome place to stay, to process, to explore and produce. 

Moving in day 1

Setting up my workplace day 2

After dumpster diving

Working on small scale experiments day 3

Exploration day 3

Exploration day 4

First selection of small scale work arranged as a Cabinet of curiosity in my studio space day 5

Experiments on a larger scale in front of the pottery barn workspace day 6

Experiments on a larger scale in front of the pottery barn workspace day 7

Assisting dog Odie:-) 

Experiments on a larger scale in front of the pottery barn workspace day 7

Continuous work on a super hot day 8 

-Artemis Herber

 http://www.artemisherber.com/Welcome.html

Getting Lost In Pickens, SC

Chelsea Whitton

Ridgewood, NY

June 2017

Getting Lost in Pickens, SC

“...to be lost is to be fully present, and to be fully present is to be capable of being in uncertainty and mystery. And one does not get lost but loses oneself, with the implication that it is a conscious choice, a chosen surrender...” - Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

Ellen greets me first thing in front of the EKO House

Today is the second-to-last day of my stay at The Rensing Center. It is about 9 am. It is early June. The air is clean and cool. The sky is the same shade of blue it has been nearly every morning—unfussy but completely luminous. Occasionally there are shapely white clouds.

There is a rhythm to the weather here. As the day goes on, the sun will likely warm this little kingdom until we are all fanning ourselves. The air will grow thick. The blue sky will slowly pack itself with juicy rainclouds and, at the densest point, at the center of the afternoon, a hard rain will fall and it will feel like a great and powerful exhalation. I will sit in the guest house that has been my home for a month, with both doors open, and listen to it move across the land. It will smell wonderfully.

Chuck & Izzy are attentive guests at
 "Healing Conversations: Remember"

Early in my stay, I had a conversation with Ellen about the necessity for both order and chaos in anything worth having or doing. It’s a dichotomy we’ve each spent some time thinking about, and have dealt with in our respective projects. Order is useful. It can even be liberating. When things go as planned, predictable and satisfying as the ticks of a second hand, we begin to feel safe. We say to ourselves, now we can let things run themselves a little while we ruminate and dream. But this is, of course, an illusion. We know it is, even as we’re thinking it. Disruptions happen. We roll with the punches. We adapt, and in adapting to the unpredictable, we arrive at new levels of understanding. A little chaos, too, is useful. What about a lot of chaos, though?

The six months leading up to my time at The Rensing Center resembled an elaborate obstacle course for some kind of hardcore chaos boot camp. I had thought that this residency would be an escape. I could leave the mess where it was and come to this tranquil hideaway to create and enjoy some peace and quiet. The thing about solitude, though, is that it isn’t always peaceful. And the thing about creation—it requires you to confront the mess, not hide from it.

The World-Class Pickens Flea Market  

I’ve spent a lot of time trying to put my finger on just what makes The Rensing Center so special. It is difficult clearly define, and still more difficult to put into words. Solitude here is served all-you-can-take. It is by turns exactly what you need, and completely overwhelming. When the latter happens, you can walk down the hill and join Ellen, Deb, or a fellow resident in conversation or activity. There is always something to do with your hands if you, like me, need physical activity to center your mind. And the aforementioned rhythm of the days serves as a comfort and an exfoliant. Every day you shed a little more of what is dead, useless, excessive, in favor of what is living and nourishing to your spirit and process. You relearn how to be fully where you are. You notice everything. You heal.

Who can resist a good old-fashioned Meat & Three?

There is a time to write and there is a time to feed the mystery inside you that make writing possible. In the same way that gardening is not simply about harvesting pretty green lettuces, ready to eat—you pull weeds, you hoe rows, you turn compost, you plant seeds, you try to gently keep the pests away, and you wait—writing is not as simple as sitting down at a desk and harvesting pretty green poems. If I’m stressed, if I haven’t slept or eaten properly, if I haven’t been reading enough, how can I expect my writing to flourish?
Over the past month I have been solitary in places that challenge me and make me feel wonder. I have spent time with strangers, whose stories awaken my imagination and empathy, whose differences are a reminder that the world is wide and that people are basically good.

When I leave here in two days, I will return to that chaos boot camp. Major changes are afoot in my life, and in the lives of those close to me. Some are exciting changes; some are tragic; some are just mysterious; all will cast me into unknown depths. Thankfully, I am balanced and ready. I will take Rensing with me.

-Chelsea Whitton
www.chelseawhitton.com

CONTEMPORARY AESTHETIC AND NATURE

Catherine Cross Tsintzos

Celebration, Florida

June 2017

Contemporary Aesthetic and Nature

The grounds and interiors of The Rensing Center display a collection of works by some of America's most collected and well-known American Fine Craft Artists.  When walking the grounds and spending time within the houses and educational buildings at Rensing, the aesthetic is right.
  

Works displayed share examples of contemporary fine craftsmanship in a multitude of mediums.  Rensing buildings and grounds prominently feature ceramic works, including a variety of clays, glazes and firing techniques (both wheel and hand-built), fiber and textile pieces, paintings, photography, prints, social justice pieces, mixed media, sculpture, blacksmith iron and metal work.

  

All share an earthly aesthetic that connects to Rensing’s emphasis on nature, whether one is working in or viewing the gardens and pastures, or simply enjoying them as backdrops to joyful get-togethers with progressive discussions about art and the environment.

The preeminent Artist Residency in South Carolina, on 27 acres, serving up to three Residents at a time, along with community programs.  When the aesthetic is right, magic can happen.  The works displayed at Rensing are ever-changing, but the core of the contemporary craft collection includes pieces dating back to artists working at the beginning of the American Craft Movement, nearing the end of the Black Mountain College reign.

  

Director Ellen Kochansky's work was included in 1993's "The Year of American Craft" by then President Bill Clinton, and was featured with the first White House Collection of American Crafts in 1995. This heritage of American artistry is a constant inspiration due to the contemporary aesthetic and nature. 

The Rensing Center's history is rooted in arts and education.  Artists of all disciplines, writers, musicians and environmentalists from all over the world come here and can immerse themselves in an art history that is visually placed in nature, all in perfect alignment with Rensing's mission and desire to elevate a harmonious experience.

- Catherine Cross Tsintzos, Interdisplinary Artist