Shedding Light on the Working Forest:
Kathleen Kolb, painting, and Verandah Porche, poetry
October 5-December 30, 2016
Visual artist Kathleen Kolb and poet Verandah Porche have joined forces to create a traveling exhibition called “Shedding Light on the Working Forest” based on paintings Kolb has created about this subject over the past twenty years. This project celebrates the landscape of the working forest and the voices of those who have honed skills into a livelihood there. “Shedding Light” draws on the artistic friendship of a painter and a poet who are committed to subjects that have been largely overlooked by the arts. Kathleen Kolb evokes what is solid, luminous, yet ephemeral in the scenes she gathers and painstakingly paints. She talks about how a moment of “emotional ignition” kindles a work of art. As a writing partner, Verandah Porche befriends, questions and listens, to unearth and preserve the poetry embedded in lived experience. She calls this process “finding the verse in conversation”.
A contemporary realist working in oil and watercolor, Kathleen Kolb is known for her dramatic handling of light. Vermont Life magazine featured an article about her paintings of the logging industry in their winter 2009-2010 issue and her work for Art of Action focused on the leading edge of the working forest in Vermont. She earned her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design.
Verandah Porche has created told poems and shared narrative with elders, factory workers, literacy students, patients, and others, during residencies across New England. She holds an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters from Marlboro College.
Despite public concern about climate change and sustainability, many people are unaware of what actual work goes on in the forest surrounding them. Vital ecosystem services provided by the forest are often poorly understood. Though the public relies on the working forest, skilled labor is rarely portrayed or deeply valued. The voices of the loggers, sawyers, and others who work in the forest are absent from conversations about interdependence and care of the planet.
“Shedding Light on the Working Forest” opened at the Brattleboro Museum and Art Center in October 2, 2015, where it was the centerpiece of the Windham Regional Commission’s awareness campaign on the working forest economy. The Vermont Folklife Center presented the exhibition during the winter of 2016. Since then it has traveled to sites in Maine and Connecticut. A full color catalog is available, including visual art, poems, narratives and essays by an art critic and a forestry professional.
(text adapted from the venue’s press materials)
INFORMATION
Vermont Supreme Court
111 State Street
Montpelier, Vermont 05609
(802) 828-0749
Hours:
Monday-Friday, 8AM-4:30PM
Image:
Log to Lumber
by Kathleen Kolb
12″x18″
oil on panel
2009
Collection of the Vermont Folklife Center