allTURNatives: Form + Spirit–25 Years of the Windgate ITE Residency Program

Breakthroughs

Whether arriving with a set agenda or with open expectations, many resident fellows discover new potential for their work during their residency experience. Returning to the familiar routine and responsibilities of daily life, they find their work and outlook irrevocably widened. This phenomenon is a major draw among residency programs all over the world; it is certainly a common experience among fellows of the Windgate ITE Residency Program.

Gael Montgomerie and Derek Bencomo both found themselves leaning away from the bowl-centric or production work that had guided their practices before their arrival in Philadelphia. Jean-François Escoulen began creating whimsical, impractical sculpture during his time in Philadelphia. Cha Jong-Rye, a high-relief sculptural carver, experimented with woodturning for the first time, while Vivian Chiu found her own language in sculpture and woodworking, forging a path that allowed her to assert her personal identity in her sculpture and installation work. Encountering salvaged police barriers, Ellie Richards found ways to merge social issues with her own processes to leverage her work as a call for justice and change.

Collaborations

One of the most unique aspects of the Windgate ITE Residency Program is its focus on collaboration. In the course of the residency, five artist fellows, one student artist fellow, one visual documentarian, and one scholar fellow gather for eight weeks of shared experiences. During this time, the fellows live, work, and travel together. In their first week in Philadelphia, they also participate in a collaborative event, the Echo Lake Conference, an invitational at Bucks County Community College that hosts artists specializing in a variety of artistic disciplines for a three-day, nonstop festival of creating and communing.

The collaborative environment fostered by the ITE experience is manifest in a range of outcomes, among them group-made assemblages that serve as documents of a shared experience, as seen in the 2016 cohort’s work Separation-Infinity-Stratify-Crunch-Deviate-Myth and Scrap Sphere, which was created by the 1997 fellows. It can also take the form of intense dialogues between artists, exemplified in Todd Hoyer and Hayley Smith’s Untitled #1 (Hoyer and Smith’s collaboration developed into a personal union—the artists married in 1999). Like many experiences, however, collaboration can also take shape in more subtle forms that show up in an artist’s work long after the residency is over, in the use of a new technique adopted as a result of a late-night conversation.

Disruptions

Picking up and traveling to participate on a far-away arts residency can be a jarring experience, especially if the program is located in the middle of a loud, urban setting like the Center City neighborhood of Philadelphia. Many artists view residencies as necessary shakeups that force them to rethink their conceptual approaches and processes. The cacophonous noise and sweltering heat of the city in July creates its own setting for artistic inspiration and many of the ITE fellows, among them Ashley Ericksmoen, Bo Schmitt, and Jérôme Blanc and David Bender, have responded with work that addresses political and social problems, or tackles conventions built into the craft of wood working. Others, such as Graeme Priddle battle a profound sense of homesickness—their work reflects their yearning for family members or the more pastoral vistas of home. Jason Russell focused on the tension that can surface among adults living in close proximity and the ways this tension can inspire or distract from the overall experience.

Documentations

In her 2011 essay for the Center’s collection publication Turning to Art in Wood: A Creative Journey, Robin Rice (ITE Scholar Fellow 2002) wrote: “The Center likes to document growth.” Though this value has permeated all of the Center’s programming from the time of its founding to the present, it is nowhere as evident as it is in the Windgate ITE Residency Program, which has designated at least one fellowship every year, since its launch in 1995, to fostering research, critical writing, and both visual and written documentation to chart the events of the residency as well as its contributions to thinking through art in wood. Karl Seifert’s wood-bound album containing his photographs, created in 2010, set a precedent for photojournalists and visual documentarians to follow, as seen in works by Fellows Samuel Lang Budin, Cristina Tamarez, and Amy Forsyth.

For artist fellows Eli Avisera and Hartmut Rademann, their artwork serves as a document of process and conceptualization, and the sights and experiences of unfamiliar surroundings, respectively. Avisera’s work, with its status !לא גמור [Unfinished] a handwritten proclamation across its gessoed surface, embodies the experience of working against time but with new ideas and possibilities. Rademann’s work is a different form of documentation: his ongoing Diary in Wood series in hand-carved found branches features scenes from the city witnessed during his time on ITE.

Explorations

Wood is a unique material among arts mediums. It is almost never a blank canvas; rather, the elaborate narratives of wood—found in all types, from black walnut to spalted maple—are visually embedded in the material itself. “Truth to materials”—a guiding principle of twentieth-century art and architecture in the Western world—has inspired many artists, designers, and makers for over a century of practice. The use of opaque paints that obscure stunning grain figure, or the use of wood in combination with other materials, was at one time viewed as a transgressive act.

Exploration is a core value of the Windgate ITE Residency Program. The residency has always been, by design, a “no strings attached” invitation for artists to challenge the conventions of the field of art in wood and to work in an environment free from all constraints (except time). Over the past twenty-five years, residents have experimented with materials, techniques, and processes—from turning bowling balls on a lathe, to working with local glass artists or integrating found materials that bring the gritty reality of the city into their work. Often, this period of experimentation and play leads to breakthroughs or major, irreversible career shifts and widens the scope of possibilities for intersections between the material and creative engagement.