The Villa Terrace Decorative Arts Museum presents eleven life-sized, fabric wrapped sculptures in the exhibition "Marilyn Annin: Material Revisited" continuing through this fall. At the opening on Wednesday the artist sat on the museum's terrace overlooking Lake Michigan instead of in her own home in Northern Wisconsin's Land 'O Lakes. Annin still welds and fabricates her sculptures even though she's a little over 70 years old, which all began when she was two and continually holding a crayon in her hands. While Annin explains she needs to be careful and rest when completing her new pieces, because of all the hand stitching required to add the buttons, pop tops, and tiny chains, there's no end in site for her creative mind set.
Q: Creating your sculptures requires a great amount of energy, correct?
A: I'm wearing my hand out sewing on all those buttons and I need the discipline of time and place, stop and rest. To create one of the sculptures is intense, about four months of work. It's very tiring welding. So I weld in the morning, and then plan an easy week with rest in the afternoon.
Q: So you really enjoy the welding?
A: I have a welding studio outside my house, and when you're not in a hurry, you just putter away and enjoy the process. Then you [as an artist] become really secure in just doing it [the art]. But I do all my fabrication and the sewing in a small studio inside my home. But I also paint in acrylics because it uses a different part of your brain.
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Q: Could you say something about your Torso Series?
A: I'm not sure I'm finished with this series yet. I wanted to do a series and they're like corsets. I may add to them in the future. This is really [my] portraiture. I have a particular person in mind when I created them, but it's not a shared experience with everyone, so that's why they're titled. And originally I hadn't painted them but they weren't complete until they were painted.
Q: And what are you working on now?
A: I'm working on a piece using plastic six-pack rings along with shoelaces and string. It's a brand new baby for me. I've spent less than two weeks working on it. It's going well, but I don't always know how its turning out. And then when its finished, I may never do this again.
Q: Is this similar to your piece titled Second Nature?
A: Second Nature was shown at Grinnell College [in an exhibit}, with artworks created on food consumption, about growing and how food changes. I used plastic produce bags and aluminum pop-tops in this piece. It's concerned with how impersonal our food production is. We don't know where our food comes from. I have bins of stuff like this that I collect, from our culture. This throw away stuff. But [through the art] it has been given value.
