Second Nature

Fruits of her labor: Winifred Lutz uses gourds ...

Winifred Lutz finds nature's discards and makes them new again.

by Susan Hagen

Winifred Lutz has built a substantial career on the close examination of nature and other found situations and, as she says, "blurring the boundary between what's made and what's found." She has constructed many site-integrated installation sculptures over the past 30 years in the U.S. and Europe, as well as an ongoing series of smaller freestanding sculptures. She's an accomplished papermaker, having traveled to Japan and Korea to study papermaking methods, and she combines traditional Asian and European techniques of casting and sheet-making in her work. This show is Lutz's second at Gallery Joe and features freestanding floor and wall pieces, as well as a couple of hanging pieces, all made from found and natural objects combined with string and handmade paper. The majority of pieces on display (29 out of 35) were made this year.

Lutz's fastidious workmanship, nearly invisible at times, creates art for the senses. Her work is emphatically tactile and visual. One piece, untitled (balance), a spindly tower of natural and man-made materials, requires close examination. A chunk of concrete (cast in a plastic bag) and a twisted stick supports a thinner stick laid vertically with an oval cast paper form balanced on one end. Held in tension by a thin gray thread attached to the base, the piece is a study in materials, weight and balance. The sense of smell is stimulated in a piece like untitled (leaning), made out of a strip of bark, about 26 inches long, that curled and gripped a round slab of rotted flax paper as it dried. It's a sculpture that made itself from a convergence of musty pulp and decomposing bark. In untitled (hemisphere with light source), a stick protrudes from the wall, making a natural holder for a cut-open gourd that's been sealed off by a round piece of greenish paper. Our senses struggle to make something inside. Like Plato's cave, we're not sure what.

Working extensively with bark in two larger pieces, Lutz teases imagery from large, bulky forms with humorous results. One, titled From the Correspondent, Not Equivalent series: untitled (land shoe and Leviathan), consists of two parts joined by a thread that goes through a hook in the ceiling. On one end a heavy chunk of bark-covered wood acts as an anchor, and on the other end a 3-foot "shoe," made of beech bark textured like elephant skin, hangs just below eye level. Another piece from the same series, untitled (wall grotesque yearning for a breathless floating mountain), has an anchor shaped like a deformed toad attached to the wall. The string weightlessly suspends a miniature mountainous landscape, made of bark with a smooth and curved transparent paper bottom, about 7 feet from the floor. Like humorous, visual fairy tales, the images in these pieces are isolated and balanced -- as is the sheer physical weight.

and avocado hulls, along with bark, pulp and other natural materials, for her installations.

In an appealing group of smaller pieces, Lutz focuses the senses even more. Untitled (copper void tilt), a wall-hung piece, allows us to observe copper leaf through tiny pin-pricks in a sheet of curling paper covered with a thin wash of gritty sumi ink. Untitled (paper speaking stone) is a small flat (ostensibly monochromatic) stone with a large "mouth" that emits a thin fluttering piece of paper. On closer examination, the colors of both parts -- gray, slate blue, bone, rust -- are rich and carefully balanced. Untitled (wave hull), made from half of a dried avocado skin juxtaposed with a rippling, unbelievably graceful section of pigmented flax paper, tempts us to study an odd congruence between the grayish rotten-looking coloration of both components. All of these pieces have a gentle humor that captivates our senses and piques our curiosity.

By imitating and expanding from nature's processes of growth and decomposition, Lutz achieves an eloquent state of artifice in her new works made from paper, wood and other found materials. Though well-made, they have none of the self-forgetful reverie of repetition that's a part of traditional craftsmanship. Lutz works with sustained and acute consciousness, making tenaciously specific sculptures that awaken the senses.

Winifred Lutz: findings

Through Oct. 30, Gallery Joe, 302 Arch St., 215-592-7752

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