Penland – Page 125 – The Penland Sketchbook

Posted on August 14, 2015 by Penland

Farewell to Micah, Dustin, and Rachel

Today we bid a fond, sad farewell to three of our resident artists. Micah Evans, Dustin Farnsworth, and Rachel Meginnes have been wonderful community members since arriving at Penland in 2012 and have continually inspired us with their work.

Micah, our resident in glass, will be heading to Austin, TX to set up a studio there and continue his work. During his residency, he made everything from glass topographic maps to yo-yos to involved decanters—all of them exquisite.

Dustin has spent his three-year residency focused on figurative sculpture, producing monumental narrative pieces that are both intricate and immersive. This fall, he will spend the semester at the University of Wisconsin-Madison as a Windgate Artist in Residence.

While at Penland, Rachel moved between painting and textiles, transforming plainwoven fabric into gorgeous and subtle studies of color, texture, and pattern. She is headed to Indiana to teach at Earlham College for the next year but will be back at Penland in fall 2016 to teach a concentration.

Best of luck to each of these three talented artists as they continue exploring new ideas in their work! We’re eager to see where those explorations take them, and we’ll always be eager to welcome them back to Penland.

Posted on July 27, 2015 by Penland

Photo of the Week: Don’t Yell into the Ear Trumpet

Jeff Goodman, who is teaching a photo/video/documentation workshop this session, made this sequence of pictures of studio assistant Laurencia Strauss (listening) and instructor Christina Shmigel (yelling) for a flipbook demonstration. Of course, anything you can make into a flipbook, you can also make into an animated GIF.

Posted on July 23, 2015 by Penland

A Tradition of Innovation

KT Hancock at Penland — Student KT Hancock working in the Penland iron studio. Photograph by Mike Belleme for WNC Magazine.

WNC magazine’s current issue contains an excellent story, titled A Tradition of Innovation, that presents an illustrated overview of Penland School. You can read the article on the WNC website. Here’s a teaser:

The more time one spends at Penland, the more one understands the sense of connectivity and pulse of mystery that’s hard to define to an outsider. Though almost everyone who visits can agree there is a certain magic to the place. “There’s a removal from the day-to-day that happens when you have to drive up and up and up, and then up some more into the mountains, and you come around a corner and there’s that valley with the studios behind it,” says Steve Miller, another trustee who runs the MFA program in book arts at the University of Alabama and has taught at Penland 14 times. “That remove, that temple at the top of the mountain phenomenon—it moves me every time.”

Thanks to writer Brian Barth (who is a relative of Penland’s founder Lucy Morgan) and photographer Mike Belleme for their fine work on this piece.