CLOUDS WEATHERING
I found myself mesmerized by the hills and valleys of draping fabric and the ever-shifting piles of bulbous clouds encountered in daily life. I became inspired to make a cloud in stone that would be equivalent in weight to the real cloud on which it was based—a meditation on the paradoxes of weight and weightlessness, the material and immaterial, and presence and absence.
- Karen LaMonte
VIEW SLIDESHOW BELOW
A PERFECT STORM
WEATHER AS METAPHOR
As a kid, I thought clouds were made in a nearby power plant. From my bedroom window in New York City, I would watch billowing steam climb from its chimneys into the sky. My fascination with clouds has never ended.
Clouds intrigue me because they make visible the invisible forces of the natural world. They pepper the sky with transition, becoming being and not being, speaking universally to human impermanence, which Johann Wolfgang von Goethe called “constancy in change.” John Ruskin wrote that “between the heaven and man came the cloud.” Perhaps this is why cumulus clouds are the choice for religious imagery in both the East and the West. In traditional Chinese art, the female earth essence is manifested in the clouds; as a fusion of the elements of water and air, sky and earth, they are considered the union of yin and yang.
In Western religious art, clouds are the domain of saints and gods. In Islamic esotericism, the cloud is the primordial state of Allah. With much simpler thoughts in mind, I started making my own clouds when I was twenty-three years old. After graduating from Rhode Island School of Design, I made sculptures capturing weather under bell jars, and I enameled clouds on the surface of glass flowers and blown glass dresses. Inspired by the Surrealist works of René Magritte, I planted the flowers in the Black Rock Desert on the edges of Burning Man in 1995.
Over the next decade, the small dresses evolved into monumental sculptures. As I worked with increasingly exaggerated drapery, such as in Reclining Drapery Impression, I started to see the body as a landscape shaping the mountains of fabric tumbling across the figure. Eventually, drapery, landscape, and weather merged in my glass and ceramic abstractions.
