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In The Studio
Glenora Kelly Smith
Her "Nantucket Nest" is, in the off-season, a workshop for creation and inspiration. Smith built the house from the shell of a salt box to include a greenhouse that doubles as a living room. Plants and objets d'art emerge from nooks and crannies. Smith has cultivated them, as she has cultivated a remarkable life filled with stories. "Creative process is very intuitive to me," the artist said. "I'm willing to risk to try something new to bend the rules. I've never been part of the mainstream, which doesn't bother me in the least." Smith grew up in Rye, New York, surrounded by the total freedom often given to children in rural places and spent time extracting inspiration from the natural world, still a major muse. Her father was an inventor with a factory in New Canaan, Connecticut. In this factory, he built for his daughter a little loft in the office, fom which she could observe his imaginative work and proceed with her own. "I would watch as he would get an idea, sketch it out and go flying into the factory, where his idea would go from being a sketch into the assembly line and come out as a finished product," Smith recalled. "As a young child, I was aware that ideas matter; they have value." In her current home, Smith still has a loft for dreaming, where she does a good portion of her creating. Visitors to Nantucket Arts Collective shows will be familiar with her beautiful fiber art, but Smith's dreaming workshop has also become a home for archetypal masks and fairy houses - the latter built from a foundation of shingles downed during winter storms. Smith began working in fiber when her first marriage to an heir of a textiles' dynasty took her to the Philippines. When Smith wasn't bartering with the natives at the local village, she learned from them how to strip and dye the fabrics from plants she grew in her garden. Thus began a career that would sustain Smith after she divorced and began raising her children. In Manhattan, she did freelance design for magazines. Now retired on Nantucket, "creative energy" is still the batter that drives her. "Creative energy is the life force, an ability to go beyond one's self. It expresses passion," Smith said. "I get involved in something creative every day, whether it be puttering in the garden, or dancing to music or working on something." Like the child who watched her father's initial sketch become an invention, Smith is still very much influenced by the initial image one has when creativity strikes. "One morning, sipping my coffee, I realized that you cannot have an idea without having an image," said Smith, also a poet and writer. Smith has also begun a book of fables representing the struggles her son and daughter have encountered after being diagnosed with muscular dystrophy in their 30s. Smith, who raised her children with a sense of magical realism, said that her children are applying their energy to overcoming the condition, as opposed to being weighed down by it. Smith believes in wars of the spirit, and has applied her beliefs to a Warrior Mask - one in a series of archetypal masks she has been creating in her home and hopes to show at a gallery. The masks represent images such as Mother Nature, The Muse, the Garden of Eden and Anima/Animus and come in different mediums, including leather, needlepoint, fabrics and sand coral. The Warrior Mask, which Smith said she will never sell, is a papier-mâché mask built on the truth that each warrior's fighting ability is based on both sword and shield. "It's interesting to consider: What do I consider my sword and what do I consider my shield?" said Smith, who identified her sword as truth, "which cuts through everything," and her shield as "love." "Love of my fiber work and my family that I depict using lace my grandmother made. Love of nature. Love of the sea that I depict in broken shells, and also love of freedom," Smith said. "I'm a free spirit. I love that in myself, too." I |
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