The woodland is merely a witness to our brief lives. It cycles with endless consistency through the seasons, and we see what we want to see in it. There is no season more adept at amplifying our inner thoughts than Vermont stick season, the time between the cacophony of fall colors and the brilliant white and blues of winter.   The thick gray sky bears down on the naked landscape leaving only the tree trunks, like black smudges on a muted canvas.

Stick season can be the peaceful absence of noise - or deafening silence. Infinite grays and textures can turn into a colorless void. Grateful solitude can yield to isolation.  And depression, like a flightless bird, envelopes hope.

It is wait-time for me, until the snow falls and bathes every surface in light.

Stick Season

April 5 – May 7, 2023

Boston Sculptors Gallery LaunchPad Gallery

Clearly Volp is an artist who reflects on the symbolism of the world around her. She calls stick season “a liminal state”—one that evokes deep introspection in her. The diversity of textured barks, hollows, and scars bring to mind her own life cycle, and losses that still pain her. She has created this impressive installation as a tribute to the essential life process of questioning and healing. The installation, with its muted, introspective tones, is like poetry in form. This writer encourages your visit. — B. Amore

Art New England, March/April 2023

This is all about the basics.

After a lifetime of making sculpture I find myself drawn to the simple: shape, form, surface, and the nuances of subtle color. I love how light falls differently on a glossy surface and a matte one. Or how shadow slides over a curved form with infinite degrees of gray but sputters across a craggy form. I thrill at intersections where line meets line, shape meets shape, ivory meets polar white and there is harmony - or a brawl.

Neuroscientists think that recognizing shapes and understanding simple geometry may be primal and unique to human beings. I don’t know this for a fact, but I do believe that simple shapes and forms evoke conscious and unconscious associations. And absolutely inspires imagination.

Sometimes a cone is more than a cone.

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Western culture is rife with monuments to war heroes and military leaders. Horse and man merge, united in a symbol of male virility and domination. 

The works in The Politics of Fear are decidedly un-monumental.  The pieces are not made of gleaming marble, but rather from modest materials: buffed graphite applied onto thrift store plastic horses, nylons and rubber balls. The polished graphite highlights the uneven seams and joints, the textures of the rough nylons and the smooth plastic curves of the animals. The small scale requires a viewer to draw close, therefore limiting the interaction to a very personal experience.

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The exhibition How?Now. at the Boston Sculptors Gallery, Boston Ma, in June 2019 was comprised of pieces from the series Politics of Fear started in 2017 and new pieces. These new pieces were tall plinths made of styrofoam, plaster, and plywood. Spindly and in disrepair, propped up with hardware, tape, and string, they represented the dubious monuments created to the men and ideologies that have controlled the narrative of our nation. The exhibition asked us to question these monuments and imagine an alternative.

In the fall of 2020, and in response to the Black Lives Matter movement and massive public call for the removal of Confederate monuments, the structures from How? Now were disassembled and re-assembled into an installation called What Now.

To see a video interview with Kathleen Volp about this work. 2020

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The installation "PRONK!" is an exuberant contemporary dialog with a 17th-century painting by Adriaen van Utrecht in the tradition of Dutch pronk still lifes (after the verb pronk, meaning to "show off").

Volp, who works in assemblage, combines materials including fake fruit, faux cockatoos, thrift-shop antiques and wood-grained spandex to address the parallels between the “ostentatious display” of commodities during the Dutch Golden Age and today’s conspicuous consumption.

Drawing on her longstanding engagement with the field of visual culture, she began by deconstructing van Utrecht’s painting through close looking to discover the relationships between the image and the viewer, or consumer, finding the narratives signaled by the objects and their arrangement, placement and perspective. The resulting riotously exuberant works humorously comment on the seemingly incongruous elements of the still life, not least of which is the titular live cockatoo (represented by a not particularly lifelike plastic parrot).

-Mary Bucci McCoy

read the full ESSAY BY MARY BUCCI MCCOY

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