Solitary Standing: ‘La Primavera’ by Carol Setterlund.

Photograph by Lenny Siegel

Alone in a Crowd

Sculptor Carol Setterlund’s soul totems

By Gretchen Giles

The ancient academic school of formalism dictates that a work of art should stand apart from the artist. Biographical concerns, personal habits, and documented quirks should remain resolutely banished from the mind while in the presence of the artist’s work. That’s all very well and good for the high, sere aerie of academia, but when viewing the heavy-headed beachwood sculptures of Cloverdale artist Carol Setterlund, formalist strictures give way to the simple jaw drop.

Standing perhaps five feet tall and weighing perhaps 100 pounds after Thanksgiving dinner, Setterlund nonetheless snaps on a heavy protective helmet and wields a chain saw to make her figures. She tramps Jenner beaches alone, canny-eyed with a rope, to find her massive logs. And then–like a 21st-century pyramid builder, a crafter of Stonehenge, or a Mayan architect–she somehow manages to get these huge, water-soaked burdens across the sand, up a slippery trail, and loaded into the car home, where she’ll drag them into the studio to create tall, secretive busts of incredible solitude.

Walking into a Setterlund exhibit–which is easy to do, as her “Recent Works” shows through June 23 at the Erickson Fine Art Gallery in Healdsburg–is to be reminded of the ineffable loneliness sometimes found in a crowd. Working from a mythology both private and profound, Setterlund peoples the Erickson’s elegant space with nothing less than 21 relics of the soul.

Primitive, totemic, and brutal, Setterlund’s figures are often tall piled spindles of wood discs built upon each other, topped with a block and towering over six feet. But the “bodies” are useless; it’s the heads that command. Seeming to emphasize the raw intellect of taste and smell and touch over sight and sound, her pieces sport oversized noses and gaping, soiled mouths. Many are blind; their ears, blocked and ineffectual.

However, the sense of sight is most rewarded in meeting these pieces. While the long stretch of Alberto Giacometti’s figures spring to mind upon viewing Setterlund’s sculptures, his work was purportedly made to be seen from a nine-foot perspective–evidently the distance at which he sat from his models when working. Setterlund’s are best seen from the intimate distance of an inch.

Appearing bleached and whitened at first, in close proximity her works are riotously colored, the white pushed back to reveal blues, purples, oranges, pinks–the pulsing hues of the corporeal. The wood is meticulously pitted and worked, hand-knifed into order and then gently salved with putty. One feels an immense empathy for such pieces as Charade, a Buster Keatonesque figure with haywire hubcap hat in mawkish makeup. In fact, one feels an enormous empathy for each of these solitary figures, so like us in their isolation, defects, and beauty.

Above all, Setterlund’s pieces bespeak our basic human desire to reproduce, to leave behind a process, be it progeny or statuary. Like the mysterious heads on Easter Island, her works seem to be mute testaments to–if nothing else–at least making a mark on the good green earth during one’s too-brief sojourn. We haven’t much evolved, she seems to report, when beach-drowned wood is still dragged ashore to be fashioned with meticulous roughness into representations of . . . just plain old us. Setterlund furthers this by adding crowns and wings and breastplates to her figures made from scrap metal and nautical rope and stiffened kelp and old rusty wire. Others’ castoffs and nature’s brusque actions coalesce in human hands to form–more humans?

Drawing from history (Ajax, Minos, Ptolemy, Anacreon), opera (Capriccio), wordplay (Epigram), and fancy (Pirouette), Setterlund creates her own visual vocabulary peopled with fools, freaks, elders, the sainted, the sane, and the sage. Yes, indeed–back to us.

‘Carol Setterlund: Recent Works’ shows through June 23 at Erickson Fine Art Gallery, 324 Healdsburg Ave., Healdsburg. Gallery hours are 11am to 6pm, Thursday-Monday. 707.431.7073.

From the June 6-12, 2002 issue of the North Bay Bohemian.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

Photograph by Bob Stender

Crowning Glory: Amy Smith, shown here dying her hats, throws open her studio doors to the public for Sebastopol’s Art at the Source.

Head Shop

The source of Amy Smith’s art is a topper

By Gretchen Giles

Amy Smith is glad to have a visitor, even if it means cleaning up. She proudly points out that the brightly colored threads in her West County studio are spooled by hue, that her scraps of silk and velvet are tidied away in plastic boxes, her feathers are categorized, and that her large collection of blind, bulbous heads is arranged on new shelving.

The heads, rest assured, are wooden. Some are carved to cunning brims, others bear deep creases in the crown, a few could put the stove in Lincoln’s pipe, and one flirts up at the side, presumably to better allow a flapper’s neat bob to peek out beneath.

Smith practices the old-fashioned art of millinery, or hat making, creating artistic headwear in the airy brightness of her newly neat studio while classical music quietly plays, her ancient dog pants in a stream of sun, and the iron steams its clean, familiar scent.

Exhibiting her work as part of the Sebastopol Center for the Art’s eighth annual Art at the Source open studio tour, running June 1-2 and 8-9, Smith has good reason to straighten up.

According to Sebastopol Center for the Arts executive director Linda Galletta, an estimated 3,000 people took this self-styled tour of artist’s studios last year, resulting in more than $177,000 in total sales over one weekend for the 66 participating artists. This year, the event stretches to two weekends with some 91 souls willing to throw open their doors, pour some cheap wine into plastic cups, and invite hordes of complete strangers into their most private spaceÑwhere they create art. What’s more, once the strangers have arrived, sipped, and looked, they’re going to want to talk about it.

All of which is cheery fun for Smith, who, like most visual artists, works in complete isolation.

“I like having feedback and having visitors in my space,” she insists. “I’ve been trying to find a way not to work so alone.”

But working in a crowd, albeit an underage one, is what led Smith to millinery in the first place. As a young textile artist with two babies underfoot, she quickly realized that printing 100 yards of cloth at a time, hand-painting lingerie, or working with the wet mess of tie-dye was hard to do with curious toddlers threatening to upend the works. “I needed something I could do up here,” she says, patting the large padded worktable where she sits to block her hats. “It’s what wacky female artists did during the turn of the [19th] century. And,” she smiles, “you can finish a hat during naptime.”

A petite, smiling-eyed woman in her 40s, Smith grew up in a family of crafty women. Her mother had her own small hat-making business, and an entrepreneurial aunt had two retail stores devoted to handicrafts. “While my aunt would show my sisters or cousins how to make something, she’d just give me a pattern and hand me the wool,” Smith remembers. “I don’t even remember learning how to knit; it was just something I could always do. If I needed money in college, I’d crochet someone a bikini.”

Pulling a favorite mold down from her line of heads, Smith chats while she casually fashions a hat. Taking an undyed Panama from a bag, she pushes it firmly down upon the faceless mannequin. “I make vintage-style hats, so I use vintage molds,” she says as she squirts the brim quickly with water. “But I also make my hats larger. People seem to have bigger heads these days.”

The water settled into the leaf-frond weave of the Panama, Smith sprays the brim with such ordinary starch as would stiffen a shirtfront. Working quickly as she talks, she rolls the brim over in a small curl all the way around, pinning the roll deftly in place before it rebounds. “I don’t so much block a hat as sculpt it,” she explains, scrunching the crown with both hands so that three finger-made ridges appear. “I love the process of sculpting; it’s working with materials and moving them into shape. You have to get into a different mindset for finishing. Hand-sewing the edges, adding the ribbon . . . ,” she drifts off. Those are clearly chores. Making the entity that will grace a face is her pleasure.

And Smith is all for pleasure. Having previously created 700 to 800 hats a year, sitting, spritzing, starching, and sculpting as a one-woman sweat shop all alone in the studio, she’s now content to produce only 200 annually. “It’s been nice to introduce myself to my kids again,” she says. Retailing for between $75 and $250, Smith’s hats are favored by gosh-dang unnamed celebrities as well as local clients and are generally sold in art galleries, rather than clothing stores, across the country. Her own husband, however, has to wait. “Every time I finish his hat,” she smiles, “someone buys it.”

More seriously, Smith explains that her work is important to her because “those of us who baked ourselves in the sun are now being told that we need to cover up. I think we should do it in style.” She’s also developing a line of hats specifically for those who have lost their hair to the ravages of chemotherapy. “People want to stay looking beautiful.” She explains that she watches old movies for inspiration, considering indeed such soft, close-fitting beauty as the word “cloche” conveys.

Almost as many men as women purchase Smith’s work, so she has developed two steady lines, “Joe” and “Maria”Ñmore like old friends than headwear. “People come to me for that chic-but-casual look,” she says, modeling Joe, a handsome, straw, gardening-to-jazz-festival model. “Mine aren’t as crisp as store-bought hats, because I don’t lacquer them. They feel better that way and you’re not afraid to put them on.”

Taking Joe off, she turns again to the Panama. Gripping the brim edge tightly, she grimaces with effort and begins to crank the straw into a rosette. The rest of the hat pulls into shape, attaining a high haughty back and a dipped front, the finger-ridges of the crown deepening dramatically. Working swiftly, Smith pins the rosette into place and spritzes it with starch. “Everyone looks good in a hat,” she assures.

“This,” Smith chuckles as she cocks her head to admire her fast-drying work, “is the first time I’ve ever stuck with anything long enough for it to come back in style.”

Art at the Source runs Saturday-Sunday, June 1-2 and 8-9, 10am-5pm. Various locations. Free.
Amy Smith’s studio is at 5300 Denver Lane, Sebastopol. For map and complete details, contact the Sebastopol Center for the Arts at 707.829.4797.

From the May 30-June 5, 2002 issue of the North Bay Bohemian.

© Metro Publishing Inc.