In a tiny cottage dotted with colorful buoys, nestled in the front yard of her Vineyard Haven home, Marnie Stanton has hung a handful of her colorful abstract sculptures, made from driftwood and colorful electrical wire and theatre gels. The pieces are only a tiny sliver of the complete body of work — some 30 sculptures in all, with many more to come.
The theme of the project is climate change, and her goal is to create a new piece of art every week, for 52 straight weeks. There are others committed to the same timeline, around 10 in all, but Mrs. Stanton is the only Vineyarder participating in the Boston-based art enterprise called the Time Project.
“The Time Project was started by this woman, Sandie Fenton, in Boston. She’s an artist, and all of her friends are artists, pretty much,” said Mrs. Stanton. When she heard that Ms. Fenton had initiated a project in which her group of artist friends would create a weekly masterpiece for a full year, Mrs. Stanton knew she wanted to get on board.
“We meet once a month. And everybody is working in whatever materials they choose,” said Mrs. Stanton. “There are people that are doing haiku, and photography and painting . . . There’s a lady that’s making these sculptures of goddesses and leaving them all over the place. It’s really interesting.”
It’s also proving to be quite a challenge. Mrs. Stanton began her projects on the first of the month last September, and has not missed a week since. And even as some of the artists have had to drop out of the project, she continues to push herself in the creative process.
“The good news about this is you can’t dwell on something, and work it and overwork it. You just do it and then get on to the next idea. In my case, I think about the idea on Monday and then I try to formulate how it’s going to look in my mind’s eye till the weekend, and then I create it. And by the time I get to the weekend, I’ve got it all figured out in my mind, and so you can just blast it out and then you go on to the next one. It’s just this little interesting trudge along the way,” she said. If she happens to fall behind, she said she’s awake until the wee hours catching up.
The climate change theme is near to Mrs. Stanton’s heart, especially as a mother and grandmother looking to the future. “I care about the future for my kids, and everybody else’s kids. I think it’s appalling what we’ve done to the planet. It’s just not fair,” she said.
The feeling of helplessness seems almost inevitable, but Mrs. Stanton believes baby steps work best. “It’s all very depressing, actually, but if you can just kind of wrap your mind around doing something about it, it’s not so bad, I don’t think.” And focusing on the project has helped her deal with the almost overwhelming magnitude of the problem.
In the basement of her home hangs the rest of her sculpture collection, a sea of twirling mobiles in blues and reds and yellows.
Baseball Size Hail shows white circles hanging from a driftwood base next to a deep blue funnel.
“This is the size of the hail that was falling in Oklahoma and Texas. They’re the size of baseballs. And part of climate change is these extreme weather patterns. Everybody thinks that global warming, because it’s not warm, it’s cold, and we’re having huge amounts of snow, how can it be a problem? What it’s really about is extreme amounts of weather. And so here we have these huge baseball-sized hail and then tornadoes that are like a mile across. They’re huge.”
Out of Reach is a wire figure in the shape of a polar bear, perched on a narrow wedge of driftwood.
“This is a polar bear, just on the open ocean, just on a little sliver of ice. The wood represents the ice. So many of them are just drowning. All their hunting grounds are out on the ice flows, and the ice is disappearing, so they can’t get back. They swim out 50 miles and then they drown. The polar bear, that seems to resonate with the public,” she said.
Drill, Baby, Drill focuses on the aftermath of the recent oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. And another abstract figure represents the face of Mother Nature, and what Mrs. Stanton calls her “mask of annoyance.”
Each sculpture is accompanied by a written description or explanation, which Mrs. Stanton posts, with photos, on her blog. Some are personal, including a piece about her son and daughter in law expecting a child, and another is about her grief in recently losing her job as coordinator of the Vineyard Conservation Almanac at the Vineyard Conservation Society.
Mrs. Stanton said that art has been in her life for as long as she can remember. She was born in Belmont, spent part of her childhood living in Cuba, and worked as an art and photography editor in San Francisco before moving back to the East Coast. She became an art teacher for awhile, then went off to start her own business making sculptures of animals for gift shops. She then moved on to VCS, but cuts in funding recently forced the elimination of her position.
By the time the Time Project finishes up, the artists hope to have found a space big enough to hold a show for all the work they created. And when that’s finished, Mrs. Stanton said she hopes to make a book of her work, and videos to accompany it.
When asked about her favorite piece, Mrs. Stanton can’t come up with an answer. She likes them all, for different reasons, and there is no one sculpture that can individually represent the whole project.
“I don’t even have time to get proud of them. Because you’re done and then you’re on to the next one. You can’t get attached,” she said.
Marnie Stanton’s blog is outsideindesignstimeproject.blogspot.com.
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