Soldering in the metals studio on the next-to-last day of the spring session. It was a great session and now summer is coming.

Lots more Penland pictures here.

Craft in America, the Emmy-nominated and Peabody Award-winning documentary series dedicated to exploring America’s rich craft history will premiere its fourth season with Threads on PBS Friday, May 11, at 9pm (check your local listings). The first episode of Season Four, Threads, explores work by Terese Agnew, Faith Ringgold, and Penland instructors Randall Darwall and Consuelo Jiminez Underwood – nationally acclaimed fiber artists who go beyond pure technique with their story-quilts, fiber collages, and woven textiles.

(L to R) Therese Agnew, Consuelo Jiminez Underwood, Randall Darwall, and Faith Ringgold.

Throughout history, people have sought ways to craft a domestic environment that is warm, comforting, and redolent with meaning and memories. Through interviews with nationally acclaimed artists working at the forefront of their media, artists devoting their lives and pushing boundaries of technique in the pursuit of their art, Threads looks at ways in which the needle arts have evolved from the “functional” to the “meaningful.”

For more information, visit craftinamerica.org.

The Penland Gallery and Visitors Center’s Focus Gallery has opened Aviculae, its second exhibit of the season. A suite of felted-wool sculptures and drawings by artist Stephanie Metz, this exhibition is on view from  Friday, May 4 through Sunday, May 27.

"Avicular #9," felted wool

“The wool drawings and sculptures in the ‘Aviculae’ exhibit are an investigation into capturing the likeness of birds while calling attention to their complicated place in the human psyche. (‘avicular’ is Latin for ‘birdlike’). Birds are a loaded subject: people layer them with meaning, portent, and human-like characteristics; breed them into seemingly impossible forms; use them as living decorations; and depend on them to gauge the health of the environment. Birds tend to provoke strong and irrational responses: doves are revered and pigeons are reviled, yet they are the same species; crows are credited with cleverness and tool use and yet considered sinister for those same qualities. I’m drawn to the contradictions embodied in birds, and I am aesthetically attracted to them for the same reason: they are elegant in the large view, but also delightfully grotesque in the details– those feet!”

"Bird Leg Gesture," wool felted through paper

“In the same way, the material I use, wool, brings up dueling responses: it’s soft and warm and full of domestic references, but it is hair, which also triggers the ‘gross-out’ response. Depending on its use, wool is noble or humble, arty or crafty, sophisticated or simple. I am a ‘gray’ person: I have a hard time seeing all black or white on any issue, so it seems fitting that I also embrace a complicated material to reflect on the complicated world.”

"Avicular #12," felted wool

“To sculpt with wool I use a technique called needle felting. Taken from industrial origins and a subsequent craft tradition, needle felting refers to using specialized sharp, barbed needles to mat individual fibers into a united solid mass, held together by the microscopically scaly surfaces of the wool. In a process similar to hand building in clay, I repeatedly plunge hand-held felting needles into a mass of loose, fluffy wool to create nearly solid forms. To create my wool drawings I force wool fibers through paper so that the dark-colored hair acts as a mark or a line, yet has a three-dimensional character.” – Stephanie Metz

"Damask Crow (detail)," wool felted through paper

Click here to visit Stephanie Metz’s website, where you can see more of her work.

Click here to visit the Penland Gallery website.

Penland’s Focus Gallery is a space primarily dedicated to single-artist exhibitions. Focusing on individual artists over the course of the year, it will present a larger selection of their work to gallery visitors and patrons.

Click here for more information about Focus Gallery artists.

Clan Iron, who hosted Penland’s first Highland Games a few weeks ago. All the usual throwing and tossing (caber, stone, sheaf, etc) was involved (after a fashion). Clan Books won the games, although they didn’t quite measure up in the attire department.  Photo by Sam Breed.

Color-conscious green-eyed weaving student Nancy Ulliman strikes again, creating a scarf to match her friend jewelry student Pam Mackay’s baby blues.

Everyday at 4:30 PM in Kathy King’s spring clay class, several students stop working for a bit and mop the floor (a daily necessity in a clay studio). While this is going on, Kathy reads out loud from a cheesy pirate romance novel. George Bowes was here this week as a visiting artist so he did the honors on Thursday.

Our neighbor, metalsmith Marvin Jensen, is the astronaut, and jeweler Kathleen Doyle is his alien attacker. Author/illustrator and puppeteer Debra Frasier created the extraterrestrial costume. This was all pre- Photoshop and After Effects, of course, so the props, costumes, actors, and scenario had to be photographed live, in situ, in rapid sequence. The slides were then projected with a programmable two-projector setup that created the appearance of animation. Dan describes the project as an attempt to connect narrative photographic series (like the work of Duane Michals, for example) with early cinema from the 1900s.

Out of this world!

Photograph by Roger Foley.

Please join us for a lecture by master blacksmith Nol Putnam in Northlight Auditorium at Penland School, at 8:15pm on Saturday, April 28th.

Nol Putnam opened his first forge in 1973. He taught himself the craft with the help of books, stubbornness, and a mentor. Starting in the early 1980s he undertook large architectural commissions – gates, balconies, and curved handrails. While he still does a few commissions, his work since 2001 has largely been sculptural, ranging in size from the palm of the hand to architectural scale.

Nol is the featured master blacksmith at Fire on the Mountain Blacksmithing Festival, which will take place in downtown Spruce Pine from 10am to 4pm on Saturday, April 28th. Featured demonstrators at this year’s festival also include April Franklin and Mike Chmielewski.

To see more of Nol’s work, you can visit picasaweb.google.com/nolputnam

Hope to see you at the festival and Nol’s lecture!

Here’s a slide show from our the 2012 Penland Easter celebration. Craft eggs, bonnets, egg hunt, community fun…

Taking advantage of a sunny Saturday, weaving concentration student Tal Landeau does some driving in the meadow. “I’ll lose my form if I go two months without practicing!” she says.