2024 Craft Show Featured Artist: Laura Baring-Gould

AAM Interim Director Jennifer Chzranowski and Museum Trustees Diz Hormel (2024 Craft Show Chair) and Donald Wooters (2024 Craft Show Co-Chair) sat down with Laura Baring-Gould, the Featured Artist at this year’s Craft Show, to learn more about her creative practice and how it has evolved from large-scale public sculptures to craft, which Baring-Gould describes as “discrete, beautiful hand-held things.” The interview has been edited for length and clarity.  

Diz: The Museum is thrilled to have you as our featured artist for the 2024 Craft Show. Can you tell us about your background and how it influenced your work?  

LBG: As a young child I grew up in Costa Rica, Mexico, New York and California, and in the early 1970’s we settled in Alaska. As a family, we built cabins surrounded by cottonwood trees, started alternative schools, and spent time surrounded by infinite awe. Alaska was also a place where I experienced incredible community as people organized to protect wild landscapes and codify indigenous land rights. Trying to weave these together, I imagined an adult life as a scientist who would preserve wonder through public policy, so I studied sciences in college. But I felt greater connection and endurance in my art classes. Once I relocated to the East Coast I saw that people living in dense cities needed awe too. Art felt like an important and immediate way to do that.  

 

Jenn: How did you set out to do that as a young artist? Tell us more about your early work.  

LBG: At first, I gave myself five years to figure it out – I was waitressing, teaching, working as an artist assistant –and making things outdoors responding to the landscapes I could work in: lines of fallen birch trees or hundreds of pine-cones woven across a woodland park. These site-specific pieces led to large-scale work inside museums and galleries – illuminated boats suspended above 11 tons of salt in a converted wooden chapel, or a giant beehive made of wound straw in a museum abutting historically rich agricultural farmland. These projects were ambitious and required the help of many. Some were artists, others were not – but together we were transforming materials to make these magical spaces for people to understand something about the places they were in, but to also feel connected and inspired. As my practice developed, I was invited to create more substantial temporary and permanent public artworks. These pieces also required close collaboration with the local community so the work could truly be public as it honored what people feel connected to and care about.  

Don: You’ve done a lot of casts of pears. Tell us about the outdoor giant bronze pear. 

LBG: The public artwork I am most well-known for is a twelve-foot bronze pear that celebrates Dorchester, a community in Boston where the Clapps’ Favorite pear was first grown in 1830. It’s a cross pollination between the Bartlett, known for its hard skin, and the Flemish Beauty, resulting in a tough -skinned pear that inside was sweet as butter – which basically describes everybody who lives in that community.  

Diz: Can you tell us about your method for casting pears? 

LBG: The first pieces I made of pears were not ripe ones. I instead took slumping pears far past their prime and encased them in ceramic. After a two-week process of building up the ceramic, I fired pieces in the kiln, burning up the pear and leaving a hollow space in the ceramic. This negative space – the mold –gets filled with molten bronze. Once cool, I would crack off the ceramic to reveal the original pear –the same thing, but totally different. The entire process amazed me. 

My studio was filled with rotting fruit and small bronze objects when I was asked to propose a project for Dorchester. I obviously could not create a monument of a rotten pear, but I knew that the humble fruit and its stewardship might really resonate.  

Don: So how did you pivot to craft?  

LBG: While I was making these bigger artworks, I was also finding my own refuge in making smaller pieces that transformed impermanent objects into talismans of experience.  

I participated in my first Craft exhibition almost 20 years ago and loved the immediate connection people had to these bronzes and how they felt in the palm of a hand. I loved, too, the idea of taking ephemeral objects – sewn children’s caps, bamboo baskets, fish traps, or even a magnolia branch with a bird’s nest, and casting them into permanent metal.  

Diz: These pieces are so tactile. You just want to hold them. They have a solidity and permanence, but at the same time appear so delicate. How do you bring out that juxtaposition?  

LBG: It is important to hold something and have it affect you. It’s important that people at weddings have held my pieces and shared them with those they love, and equally important that others have died holding these pieces as well. While I am 

thankful for the bigger public artworks that exist out in the world, these objects can be with you.  

Jenn: It seems that your background in science continues to inform your work. Is that accurate?  

LBG: 100% yes – in every aspect of my work: I am a naturalist who collects and studies pears from heirloom trees and am amazed by the material science of bird’s building their nests. The entire process of casting, metal work, and patina are also all about material technology and experimentation. 

Jenn: After working with artists and organizing AAM’s Craft Show for the past 6 years, I know that the circuit can be grueling. What is it about craft shows that keep you coming back? 

LBG: I have been able to continue to be an artist because I unlocked the world of craft and found this essential community that values artists’ work. I love sharing my work with people, from small shows to the Smithsonian. And it is the work of organizations that hold it together – places like the Academy Art Museum– that bring people together to share stories and experience something special. The people who want to share the story and the people who want to receive the story. Even just one connection, one moment of magic. And that’s how I think lives are changed, right?