A gourd glimmers with light and shadow. The skin ripples as though some force of growth or physics has patterned it as it ripened. Gloria Calderon-Saenz has printed it in curves, in a red brown the color of rich earth.
Her mother would use a gourd like this one for darning socks, she said, as she looked at a swath of her new work at the Futures Lab in North Adams. Her mother would fit the sock around the gourd to hold a rounded shape, so she could repair the worn heels.
A gourd glimmers in sunlight in a print by Gloria Calderon-Saenz on handmade paper by Alicia Canary. Press photo by Kate Abbott, courtesy of the artists
On a sunny late-summer Saturday afternoon, Calderon-Saenz and northern Berkshire artist Alicia Canary talked about the new work they have made together. Both artists live and work in North Adams, and as a printmaker, Calderon-Saenz has studied at Universidad Nacional in Bogota and later in Atelier 17 and Atelier Adam in Paris, France
Here she has made a series of prints on Canary’s handmade paper in Unfiltered Lab, a collaboration they will show together through September 25. (Canary is also showing works on her handmade paper at Hotel Downstreet, and Calderon-Saenz has prints at the Bear and Bee Bookshop.)
“I gave myself a lot of freedom to push the limits of the printmaking medium on paper that is rough and irregular,” she said. “You will see color, familiar places as well as abstraction.
Canary made this paper from garlic stems, she said, all of them locally grown. Once ta farmer has harvested the heads of garlic and hung them up to dry, they have the stems to spare. Some of these have come from Jennifer Muñoz at the North Adams community gardens, and some from local students who tend plants in the greenhouses at Drury High School.
Futures Lab runs as an artists co-op space, and each artist has a chance to show their work. The 20 full member artists can have a two-person show each year. They also show work in group shows and run the gallery together. (Associate members can join at a lower fee and without working with the gallery, and they can exhibit in group shows.)
In late summer light, Calderon-Saenz brings her prints together in earthy hues and vivid colors. She invokes natural spaces and family stories and a sense of creative work made by hand, like stories woven into dyed cloth.
When she first talked with BTW about her work, she recalled the influence of artists she has learned from, in Panama. Guna women, artists who hold Indigenous lore, create molas, an artform of cloth woven or sewn in vivid shapes and colors. They once would have carried these bright patterns on their skin.
Leaf-green patterns and natural forms merge in a print by Gloria Calderon-Saenz on handmade paper by Alicia Canary. Press photo by Kate Abbott, courtesy of the artists
“They used to paint their bodies,” Calderon-Saenz said, “but because of cultural pressure, now they don’t. They create textiles.”
In her prints, arcs form patterns like finger prints or labyrinths, or tree rings. In one a blue wash flows like a river over the finger tip imprint.
The Hoosac River runs walled in by flood chutes, in deep green ink. Around the water, images conjure daily North Adams life and threads of magic realism: a human figure leafed like an ash tree looks out surrounded by water currents and lighted windows. Another horned like a bison echoes the water in thick rippling fur.
A coffee pot steams in the morning. a song bird lights on a stem, and a tree limb waves long leaves in the wind, like a dolphin’s flukes underwater. A hand holds a paint brush upright like a torch. And steeples hang upside down across fracture lines, as though the whole scene is reflected in a frozen puddle.
Print by Gloria Calderon-Saenz on handmade paper by Alicia Canary. Press photo by Kate Abbott, courtesy of the artists
Her images merge fantastic and real, like the shapes of microorganisms who live in the Hoosac River.
‘What water tells us
That a dream is an internal sky,
the door to an absolute world …
that trees are made of flesh,
and rivers are made of blood.’
Beings formed from greed leaves inspire a print by Gloria Calderon-Saenz on handmade paper by Alicia Canary. Press photo by Kate Abbott, courtesy of the artists
Reflecting on her work, she shares a beautiful poem by her Colombian friend poet and novelist, William Ospina.
‘That birds are spirits
and rains are memories.
And the sky is full of our waking ancestors.
That no one really dies,
no one vanishes away.
That in the forest all the voices are there,
the one who has returned as a fish,
the other one as a bird,
another one as a jaguar
which embraces in its body
the trees, the water and the wind
and all the things from the sky.’
In these new prints, she said, she gives herself the freedom and courage to reveal, to touch places close to home, and at times to play and dream.
A tower drawn in a stack of cups holds family stories. In another image, she opens a way into a house raftered and beamed with living trees and sees their taproots descending storeys below the floor, as though the whole room has grown organically and reached out to mycelial networks.
And in her home, in North Adams, she looks out over the valley toward downtown in a winter sunset. Steeples show in silhouette in the distance, and bare winter branches lace in the foreground, like a Ukiyo-e print. The old mill town reconnects with the magic and the life in the mountains. In Ospina’s words …
‘There is a musical being
made of thousands of wings,
and there are stars delving between nests …’
Sunset glows over Steeple City, and green patterns overlap like woven cloth overlain with a sunlit yellow handprint, in prints by Gloria Calderon-Saenz on handmade paper by Alicia Canary. A house grows roots, and a seed pod holds promise of new life in a vivid earthy red forest of images. Press photo by Kate Abbott, courtesy of the artists
