MARK RUDDY

Eau Claire, Wisconsin

Luna 1983

Ash, recycled redwood, walnut, pine & silk | 24x36

This cabinet was inspired by the book-matched walnut pieces on the door which I read as female. The rest of the piece plays with the feminine theme with references to the goddess Diana and the Virgin Mary. Diana was considered the patroness of the moon and goddess of fertility and childbirth. The church took some symbols associated with Diana and incorporated them in depictions of the Virgin Mary. The church I grew up in had a stained glass window showing Mary with her heel holding down a crescent moon. The crescent moon here is represented by a pine wedge, found at a log cabin construction site. The door handle suggests the ancient figurine, the Venus of Willendorf, thought to be a fertility figure or mother goddess symbol. The soft edges of the wood and the use of silk add to the feminine resonance of this piece. My choice of recycled redwood for the inner cabinet is a reference to the work of the activist, Julia Butterfly Hill, who in the late 1990s lived in a redwood tree she named Luna for over 700 days to save it from being cut down. The tree is still standing.

I am a self-taught furniture artist who was welcomed into the Chippewa Valley arts community by Laurie Bieze and others in 1988. I look for projects where I can use a slice of wood from bark edge to bark edge (a flitch) to make unique functional furniture inspired by my reading of the wood. My goal is to create something elegant that uses organic features like the natural log edges without becoming rustic. This way of working allows me to retain more essential “treeness” while still creating a refined piece of furniture.

I was born in 1946 to a farm family in North Dakota. After graduating from college, I found my way to the Chippewa

Valley after a year-long “economy tour” of Europe and time spent in Maine, Toronto, Duluth, Ann Arbor, and New Auburn, WI, honing my woodworking skills. Along the way, I earned a master’s degree in Vocational Rehabilitation. I have one son, Timothy.

Cara Tomlinson

Portland, Oregon

Fairytale

1996

Monoprint, chin colle, walnut ink, type on paper

Cara Tomlinson is an Oregon-based artist whose paintings, drawings, and sculptures focus on ecological systems and their relationship to human/nonhuman bodies. Tomlinson’s work explores tensions between simplicity and complexity, order and entropy, and inside and outside. Her recent paintings present bodies as verbs and processes, exploring heredity, vision, metabolism, waste, and sedimentation.

Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally and supported by numerous grants and residency awards including the Ucross Foundation, Millay Colony for the Arts, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Willapa Bay Artist Residency, Ford Family Foundation Grant, and an Artist Fellowship Grant from the Oregon Arts Commission. She is currently an Associate Professor of Painting at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon.

Donated to the Laurie Bieze Art Collection by Christina Yocca.