An email from Joy Feasley
Your remarks about camp were right on although I admit it wasn’t completely intentional, more well “just felt” [pun intended] (see post here on Feasley’s installation at Temple Gallery with Paul Swenbeck and Kait Midgett; the felt star under discussion is in image to right).Here is a highlighted excerpt from an old artist’s statement of mine:
I found a copy of the Campfire Girls Handbook at the Philadelphia Free Library. I was in Campfire Girls for years in the ’70s and hadn’t thought about since. As I read through the book, I was amazed by the similarities between my artwork and the photographs in the book. For years, I have been making drawings of girls involved in miscellaneous outdoor activities–chopping wood, cheerleading, meditating. The handbook showed girls in almost identical age and in similar activities; canoeing, hiking, building fires, singing, staring up at the sky . I realized the Campfire Girls are resourceful, enigmatic, and … weird.
Resourceful: We made a camp stove out of a #10 can and homemade “Sterno” from curled cardboard set into a tuna can filled with paraffin. [Made the world’s best bacon, egg, and cheese on English muffin, c.1976]
Enigmatic: The handbook suggests bringing plenty of batteries to camp as many a flashlight has died exploring the “holes” of an outhouse.
Weird: Another passage suggested the girls lie on their backs, look up at the sky and imagine the clouds as land and the sky as sea.
Pretty trippy stuff for 9-year olds. Pretty and trippy. Awful and cute.
Back to the paintings, well, I still love camping . They’re about being in the woods, listening to the trees, mapping out the stars, exploring nature, and being a kid.
One clarification on your review the show:
You mention Kait as the casting expert, which she is, but all the ceramics are hand built by Paul using terracotta and Egyptian paste. Kait contributed the two dioramas inside the cases, both are of my sister’s house in Port Jervis, NY. Kait carved and sculpted these to the smallest detail.
…The show…was 4 years in the making!
Joy
—Joy Feasley is a Philadelphia-based artist
