The 2014 Great ARTdoors Festival

We all had a great time at the 2014 Great ARTdoors Festival on October 11th!

Festival Highlights

Open Studio Tour & Talks with our distinguished artists-in-residence from California, Georgia, North Carolina, New York, and Ireland

Art Installations presented by Meg Aubrey, Peter Bahouth, Bud Brimmer, Mary Burge, and Dana Haugaard

Weaving Demonstrations by Jessica Green of A Little Weather

A Book Signing by Martha Ezzard

Invitational Pottery & Handmade Objects Exhibition featuring Hambidge Fellows and artists from across the region

U-do-Raku – choose a pot, glaze it yourself and have it fired to take home

Live Music including toe-tapping, thigh-slapping bluegrass by Oliver Rice and the Blue Ridge Mountain Boys, the arresting indie folk tunes of Lily and the Tigers, and the melodious folk jazz of Kate Schutt (a current Hambidge resident)

An Old-fashioned Pig Roast serving up our own Bar-B-Q alongside smoked Springer Mountain Farms Chicken, local tasty provisions, local wines and brews

Environmental Education & Native Plants by Beech Hollow Wildflower Farm - Click here to download a huge list of the native plants they will have available, and order online here to ensure easy pick-up at the Festival, or in Atlanta or Athens

Jewelry Booth featuring art jewelry by Jeanne Flint.

Activities for All Ages, with hay riding, grits grinding, pumpkin painting, snake handling by the Orianne Society, a bouncy house, face painting, and making pinhole cameras with Eric Mack!

This is the only time during the year when full access is granted to our protected creative sanctuary and artist studios. The 600-acre property, lovingly cared for by Hambidge since 1934, is home to seven miles of hiking trails, waterfalls, wildflowers, a swimming hole, and a number of historic structures including a working 67 year-old water-powered gristmill.

Artists

Meg Aubrey & Mark Aubrey
Peter Bahouth
Daniel Biddy
Bud Brimmer
Mary Burge
Renate Debrun
Didi Dunphy
Martha Ezzard
Jessica Green
Dana Haugaard
Lily and the Tigers
Eric Mack
Oliver Rice and the Blue Ridge Mountain Boys
Kate Schutt
Pandra Williams
Clay Woodruff

Project & Artist Descriptions

Interactive Suburban Experience by Meg and Mark Aubrey
The recognizable objects of suburbia: landscaping, sidewalks, trash cans, and brick mailboxes permeate Hambidge Fellow Meg Aubrey's paintings. The landscapes contain desperately controlled and perfectly presented elements of an environment created to hold back the engulfing emptiness of a life filled with the effort of living up to expectations. Aubrey investigates neighborhoods full of successful individuals who use outward appearance to express their achievements, yet the reality is that the promise of an idyllic lifestyle filled with beauty, friendship, and security is not always found at the end of the cul-de-sac. The female figure, forty something, well dressed, seemingly without a care, inhabits the environment and searches for her purpose in life. College educated with work experience, she now fills her days with tennis, errands, PTA, car pools, and other activities that are a substitute for the career she might have had. Shown without husbands or children, although they are clearly implied, she has become the stereotype of the upper middle class housewife. This body of work examines and deconstructs this environment, pulling apart the individual elements to tell stories of daily suburban existence. For the Interactive Suburban Experience, Meg collaborated with Mark Aubrey.

Meg Aubrey is an Atlanta-based painter who was born and raised in Massachusetts. Meg has a MFA from Savannah College of Art and Design and a BFA from Rhode Island School of Design. She has been awarded the Hambidge Residency Award from the Fulton County Arts Council, the Encore Series Award from Savannah College of Art and Design and was selected as a finalist for the Forward Arts Emerging Artist Award for 2011. Meg is a professor of Foundations Studies at Savannah College of Art and Design in Atlanta.

Mary’s Mockingbird by Peter Bahouth
Mary’s Mockingbird is a site specific stereoscopic photography project by Hambidge Fellow Peter Bahouth with an assist from Jamie Badoud and Mary Hambidge. Consisting of 6 stereoscopic viewers on stands, each viewer contains a photograph of Mary Hambidge’s handmade mockingbird cage taken at the location of each viewer. This work responds to Mary Hambidge’s early days as a professional whistler performing with her pet mockingbird Jimmy in New York City in the 20s.

Locations of the viewers:
• The wire arch near the Spring House
• The Lodge ruins on the trail walk to the Antinori Pottery Studio
• Judy’s Bench in front of Garden Studio
• The Porch of Mary Hambidge’s log house

Peter Bahouth is one of the few contemporary artists working with stereoscopic images, as technique as old as photography itself.

Daniel Biddy
Born out of a preoccupation with “looking,” a subdued mania for collections, and an integral desire to arrange groups of things, Daniel Biddy works in collage. The variance and multiplicity within its unassembled elements, the immediacy of its potential to create associative content, the element of chance and discovery in the process of mining thousands of images from source material supply an infinite fascination. His palette is gathered from printed media, unaltered beyond removal of its embedded periphery. Cutting and pasting, imagery is recycled, repurposed, re-contextualized. Equal time is spent collecting, selecting, eliminating, and assembling materials.

His intention is not to make conclusive thematic statements but to develop an expansive impression about a primarily private dialogue while simultaneously providing a significant visual basis for personal relationship within the viewer and maintaining a sense of play.

Daniel has recently shown work at the High Museum Atlanta, MoCA GA, the Atlanta Hartsfield-Jackson Airport, and the University of West Georgia. He was an Artadia Finalist in 2011, and has work in the Collection of High Museum Atlanta.

Bud Brimmer
Autumn Tour
This work of wearable art is one of thirty which will be modeled in November at the “Hats In The Garden” style show at the Naples Botanical Gardens. Bud Brimmer was chosen as one of six designers creating the unique designs, and is displaying this one at the Weave Shed Gallery during the Festival.

Bud Brimmer, from Naples, Florida, spends the winters creating special events and Christmas displays for country clubs and local residents. During the summer months he’s here in the mountains working for several charitable organizations using his creative talents in horticulture and floral arts.

Mary Burge
Sacred space has been described as a function of the desire to experience order and beauty. When the Earth was assumed to be the center of the universe, the sacred space was the center of that center - a visual symbol of people satisfying their need for beauty. In the absence of god, what remains of the sacred space is the aesthetic. Mary Burge views society’s reliance on digital copies to represent the real as a kind of search for new sacred spaces. The installations she makes are often site-specific, question one’s relationship with technology, and examine how that relationship creates narrative. At Hambidge, Mary is creating an outdoor installation set in cardinal directions as a new sacred space.

In 2003 Mary finished her BA in studio art from the University of Texas at Austin, with a concentration in photography. In 2008 she went to graduate school at the Rhode Island School of Design to get an MFA in Digital + Media. While in graduate school she pursued new mediums like performance, sound, site specific installations, and physical computing. She moved to Los Angeles after graduate school to pursue a career as an artist, and has an upcoming performance/installation at Greene Exhibitions in Los Angeles in June.

Renate Debrun
Visiting from Ireland, Renate Debrun works in printmaking and mixed media drawing, and also as a plantswoman and garden designer. She combines these two careers in her work of drawings and prints of real and imaginary animals.

Renate has been exhibiting regularly throughout the last 20 years in both private galleries and public arts centres, has received several awards for residencies, as well as grants by the Irish Arts Council, and in October will have a solo exhibition of new work at the Helix exhibition space in Dublin City University.

Didi Dunphy
An artist & designer, Hambidge Fellow Didi Dunphy is a native New Yorker, Los Angeles transplant, having moved to Athens, Georgia with her family in 2000. Ms. Dunphy received an MFA from San Francisco Art Institute in the contemporary arts. She is an accomplished artist having had exhibits in major venues such as the Atlanta Contemporary, COCA, St. Louis, Telfair Museum in Savannah, the Jacksonville Museum of Modern Art in Florida, the Armory Center for the Arts, Pasadena, CA and more. Ms. Dunphy is currently the Director and Curator at the Gallery@Hotel-Indigo-Athens and the GlassCube project space.

Visit Ms Dunphy's "A Swing for Two" at the Great ARTdoors Festival.

Martha Ezzard
The Second Bud is a story that reflects today's agricultural evolution in the southeast, from tobacco, logging, and truck farming to agri-tourism, outdoor recreation, vineyards, and farm wineries. Filled with small town characters, unlikely obstacles and dirt based success, this memoir is a down home version of "Under a Tuscan Sun," a couple's risk taking to revive a fifth-generation family farm in the tiny North Georgia town of Tiger by cultivating fine wine grapes.

Martha McElveen Ezzard, an Atlanta native, a lawyer and writer, once slept in the top of a tulip poplar, backpacked 80 miles on the Appalachian Trail, entered law school while raising three children, served in the Colorado Senate and ran for the U.S.Senate, losing the nomination by 19 votes – but those challenges were nothing compared to planting a fine wine vineyard on a family farm in North Georgia where sweet tea is still the drink of choice!

Ezzard was an award winning columnist for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, following a career in politics and law in Denver. She gave it all up to help her husband, Dr. John Ezzard, save a five-generation-old 100-acre family farm near the tiny town of Tiger where he was born. Ezzard recently won Georgia Author of the Year Award for the The Second Bud.

Jessica Green
Jessica Green is a traditional weaver who makes contemporary heirlooms. Working and homesteading in Appalachia, she creates each of her pieces from the cornerstones of hard work, handwork, usefulness and beauty. She raises her animals, spins their wool, forages for natural dyes, and weaves mere threads into cozy, timeless textiles.

Inspired by traditional “women's work,” Jessica aims to keep the fierce and tender craft of household weaving alive and remembered. Her work takes inspiration from the designs of Colonial American coverlets, which she deconstructs and reinvents to discover a draft that feels like her own retelling of the past.

The self-sufficiency and hard work of a time gone by are distilled in the weaving of Jessica's goods, and imbue households with the warmth, handwork, and spirit our American craft heritage. Jessica won the Award of Excellence at the American Craft Council show in Atlanta this Spring.

Dana Haugaard
For the past few years, Hambidge Fellow Dana Haugaard has been working with sensation and stimulation with the hopes of, even for a moment, enabling people to gain a heightened sense of self-awareness. He attempts to engineer moments in which people become more conscious of themselves and their environments and how each effects the other. Working with sound, he creates reactive environments with sensors and audio controllers that use both low and high frequency sine waves to physically affect people and spaces. The low frequency sine waves are very physical and can be felt vibrating deep inside the body. He can then use high frequency waves to find the resonant frequency of objects and structures which causes them to vibrate. These moments of unexpected physical stimulation are crucial moments as they remind us that we are aware – that we are indeed real physical beings. Dana is currently researching the mechanics of sound, trying to find ways to use and exploit the subtleties of sound to engineer a more affective experience.

Dana started making and studying art during his time at Emory University where he double majored in Art History and Visual Art. He maintained his art practice in Atlanta until 2009 when he began his graduate art degree at the University of Iowa, which he finished in 2012. He has recently moved back to Atlanta and is currently the Donna and Marvin Schwartz Artist in Residence at Emory University. In the last year and a half he has shown at the Urban Institute of Contemporary Art in Grand Rapids, MI, The State Historical Museum in Des Moines, IA, as well as some smaller pop-up spaces in Iowa City. He was also the featured artist at the Iowa Department of Cultural Affairs annual Gala. This past summer Dana was a resident at ACRE in Stubin, WI. Over the next few months he has installations planned at the Schwartz Center for Performing Arts at Emory University in Atlanta, and the Chicago Urban Art Society in Chicago, IL.

Lily and the Tigers
Down the well-traveled highways of America comes Lily and the Tigers, rambling from town to town, infecting hamlets and cities alike with their arresting indie folk. Each song spins an intricate web of love and friendship while betraying a dark, pastoral Southern Gothic undercurrent. Depending on the night, you might find the tight-knit group on a candle-lit front porch swapping songs ’til sunrise, or perhaps churning through a set at some jampacked outdoor festival, winning (broken) hearts & minds while warming up the crowd for artists like Bela Fleck, Shearwater or O’Death.

Recorded in rural Vermont, the band’s new LP, The Hand You Deal Yourself embodies that quintessential rock & roll archetype of creativity through isolation. Lily and the Tigers have created a down-home set of songs filled with ramshackle charm and anchored by a stripped-bare aesthetic.

Eric Mack
Hambidge Fellow Eric Mack, an extraordinarily talented visual artist, is volunteering with us this year to help Festival-goers make their own pinhole cameras!

Oliver Rice and the Blue Ridge Mountain Boys

Kate Schutt
Multi-talented might not be enough to describe Kate Schutt – she’s a musical triple threat: guitar-wonder, singer-songwriter, and producer-arranger. She’s also an over-achiever. A lifelong athlete, Schutt was an All American athlete at Harvard playing two Division 1 sports, Women’s Ice Hockey and Women’s Lacrosse, while graduating Magna Cum Laude in English Literature. In addition, she attended Boston’s famed Berklee College of Music, studying guitar for nine semesters. She brings this dedication and drive to her lush, melodic, and lyrically arresting music. The Philadelphia News calls her “an enticingly languid vocalist, wry composer and sophisticated arranger in the pop/jazz vein.” Hailing from Pennsylvania, Kate moved to Guelph, Canada (the “Austin, Texas, of Canada”) in 2004. In 2010, she relocated to Manhattan. Her circle of musical friends and collaborators include legendary drummer Terri Lynn Carrington, Julian Lage, Damian Erskine, and the late guitar great Jim Hall. When not playing in New York, she is on the road touring and co-writing.

Pandra Williams
Beech Hollow Farms is the culmination of a nearly decade long mission to save and propagate plants from the metro Atlanta area threatened by development and invasive species. The original idea was inspired by an area of southwest Atlanta strewn with large boulders and peppered with native plant species known locally as Boat Rock. Popular with rock climbers, the area had been mostly spared the developer’s bulldozer blade until the housing boom of the 1990’s and 2000’s slowly crept its way. The Southeast Climber’s Coalition (SCC) established a small woodland climbing preserve in 2002, but the surrounding area was still subject to the whims of land developers.

Pandra and Mike Williams, who were active members of the climbing community at the time, saw first hand the destruction to native plant populations and decided to take action. They began by working with developers to rescue plants, seeds, and bulbs before ground-disturbing activity began in an effort to preserve local genetic plant stock.

The idea to propagate high quality, locally sourced native plant species has woven its way through the Williams’ Atlanta backyard, multiple school gardens and land management agencies, an environmental education non-profit organization, and in 2009 it found a home at Beech Hollow. The property contains dry uplands, moist bottomlands, granitic boulders, and numerous populations of native plants, including the majestic grove of Beech trees. The varied ecotones and soil types make it a wonderful place to grow a wide variety of Georgia native plants in their preferred environment.

Clay Woodruff
Clay Woodruff makes still and moving pictures of places that simultaneously honor and betray perceived experience. His process pits rationale and romance against one another in a mode more reminiscent of field research than of painting en plein air. Many pictures are subjected to the distorting effects of distance and duration in an effort to reveal hidden orders. Others have him darting into frame, inscribing schema either in accord or at odds with the spatial logic of the scene. With each, limits and manipulations of camera act as exaggerated expressions of the relative, discrete particularity of time and place. Both process and product complicate the distinction between thought and experience and, when successful, dissolve the difference entirely.

Clay received a BFA from Virginia Commonwealth University and a MFA from the University of Notre Dame, where he was awarded a full fellowship. While in South Bend, he exhibited in area art spaces including a solo show at the Snite Museum of Art. Upon completion of his studies, he moved to Chicago where he exhibited at the Center for Book and Paper Arts and taught classes at Columbia College Chicago. While in Chicago, Clay was awarded the full fellowship from the Illinois Arts Council. In recent years, he has been in exhibits throughout the country and was recently awarded a residency fellowship at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Clay currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

Event Co-Chairs

Chef Jamie Allred & Jack Nolan of FORTIFY Kitchen & Bar
Martha Ezzard of Tiger Mountain Vineyards
Jeanne Kronsnoble of Main Street Gallery

Hosts

Pork-Pie Hat Hosts Alecia Adair-Foltz & Doug Foltz + Susan and Ron Antinori + Cyndae Arrendale + Turner Ball + Lucinda Bunnen + Stuart Clayton & Joe Staley + Sherry & Jeff Cohen + Margaret & Dallas Denny + Dillard Tourist Association + Jesica & Brian Eames + Martha Eskew & Chet Tisdale + Gap Partners + Maggie Hagedorn Fitzgerald & Brian Fitzgerald + Jen & Bowman Garrett + Sarah Gillespie & Jane Holley + IMAGERS Printing + Melissa Bunnen Jernigan & James Jernigan + Judy & Scott Lampert + Liz Lapidus + Marchant & Ron Martin + Michael McGaughey & Craig Kettles + Jo & Jim McLean + Donna & Jeff Mintz + Susan Reed + Kirk Rich & Todd Higginbotham + Paula & Russ Rogers + Jane Fickling Skinner & Dan Skinner + Claire Sterk & Kirk Elifson + Rosemary & Bill Stiefel + Ruth West & Bob Wells + Woodie & Steve Wisebram

Cloche Hat Hosts Robbie & Jim Caswell + First American Bank + Nikki Gugliotta + Wanda Hopkins + Ann & Tim Johnson + Marianne & Dick Lambert + Chris Lewis & John Johnson + Elizabeth & David Martin + Suzanne Shaw & Daniel Biddy + Elizabeth Morgan Spiegel + Mary & Sam Thomas + Barb & Thom Williams

Bonnet Hosts Keri & Bob Allen + Jane & David Apple + Lisa & Joe Bankoff + Becky & Tom Callahan + Lisa Ezzard & Brooks Franklin + Martha & John Ezzard + Beth Jones + Temme Barkin-Leeds & Steve Leeds + Vicky Nixon + Rosemary Magee & Ron Grapevine + Katherine Mitchell & Jack Lawing + Lynne Moody + Alex Patrick + Margaret & Kin Patterson + Ann Price + Susan & Chip Robert + Susan Todd-Raque & David Raque + Susie & Lee Winton