Joyce Utting Schutter creates sculpture inspired by the things she finds outdoors
Published in The New Bedford Standard-Times on August 03, 2007
To discover what inspires paper
sculptor Joyce Utting Schutter, just take a peek at the shelves lining the wall
of her New Bedford studio. There are rows and rows of jars and
boxes containing the stuff that gives the artist ideas for the shapes and
textures in her work. It's all the beautiful refuse of nature, picked up by Ms.
Schutter in the woods and along the beach — acorns, pine cones, pussy willows,
seed heads, feathers, butterfly wings, pine needles, seashells and egg casings.
Ms. Schutter was born in Boston and
raised in Guilford, Conn. Her parents' home was situated on 5 acres of
undeveloped woodland, and this unspoiled expanse of nature became Ms.
Schutter's playground. She loved running alongside the meandering brook behind
the house, floating acorns down the stream and plucking out fallen leaves when
they blocked the water's flow. She would curl up on soft patches of moss,
daydreaming that she was a tiny creature engulfed by the forest. This direct observation and intense
interaction with nature had a profound influence on Ms. Schutter's future as an
artist.
A recent work, "Daydream
Sailing," is a direct reflection of this experience. It is a small
sailboat, about 20 inches long, that looks like a hollowed-out half-nutshell,
crested by a sail inlaid with a pattern of baby oak leaves. The cockpit of the
boat is lined with moss and scattered with more oak leaves. Constructed of
hand-made paper pulp sprayed onto a structure of fiber-covered steel rods, the
small craft seems to call directly to the child inside, inviting us to climb in
and set sail. "Often artwork comes from the
deep place inside you that is wordless," the artist says. "It comes
out in the wordless image."
Ms. Schutter spent a year studying art
at Boston University, and a semester at the Instituto Allende in San Miguel de
Allende in Mexico, where she studied bronze casting and taught leather-working.
She later spent four years at Bethany Fellowship, a missionary training school
in Bloomington, Minn., where she met her husband, James F. Schutter. After the
couple spent time overseas together as missionaries, Ms. Schutter's husband
attended seminary in Kansas City, was ordained and began his ministry in Iowa.
Ms. Schutter gave birth to her two daughters, then returned to her art studies
at the Des Moines Art Center, where she molded the figure in clay.
When her husband's ministry relocated
the family to a town near Iowa City, Ms. Schutter enrolled at the University of
Iowa, where she earned both her bachelor's and master's degrees in fine art. As
an undergraduate, she continued her studies in casting, this time working with
cast iron. But the university's foundry was closed down when safety issues
became a concern, just as Ms. Schutter was finishing her undergraduate studies. So she turned to paper-making as a
graduate student and decided to combine this material with her previous
experience in metalwork. This brought her to the techniques of her current work
— paper surrounding a metal structure.
The temporal nature of paper appealed
to Ms. Schutter. She had been concerned about the environmental toxicity of
working with cast metal and by a sense that metal sculptures "were going
to be around for millennia." Paper's comparatively short lifespan was
reflective of nature itself, "more like life." She was intrigued that
the work "could become part of the earth again," that it had a
"mortality." The issue of mortality is one that Ms.
Schutter frequently considers as an artist. "You have to reconcile to
death as being not only possible, but inevitable," she says. "And
that's not a bad thing." She cites the life of a leaf as
symbolic of the necessity of death as part of the cycle. "No two leaves
are alike," she says. "Yet in the autumn they die, becoming part of
the earth again and replenishing the soil."
While Ms. Schutter's sculpture
explores memory and time passage through reference to nature, it also identifies
nature's visual splendor in its infinitely complex designs. "I want it to
be beautiful," she says of her work. One of her sculptures that
particularly describes the intricacy of natural forms is "Arcidae's
Purse." An arching, swelling shape, textured along its sides in shell-like
rows of striated ribs, sits on four curving legs that end in elegant points.
Through the narrow slit along the top, we can see a cluster of pussy willows
perched on long stems like pistils in a flower. As with so many designs from
the natural world, this artwork is delicate in appearance but structurally
strong.
Her working process is similar from
one piece to the next, although each one is completely unique. First she
details her intentions for the design in a sketchbook, working out the exact
dimensions and writing down her conceptual aims. Then she welds rods of carbon
steel into the skeletal structure that will support the piece. The strength of
metal, she has found, is necessary to stand up to the outer paper layer, which
has surprising force when it shrinks and hardens as it dries. Next a layer of
jute string, cotton thread or cheesecloth is wrapped around and woven across
the steel structure in a complex web.
Ms. Schutter makes paper by placing
raw flax into a machine called a Hollander beater, leaving the fibers to flow
beneath a rotating steel-bladed roller in water for hours until they become
pulpy. Then she sprays the runny pulp onto the web of twine or applies sheets
of it over the form, depending on the degree of translucency she is aiming for
or the texture she wants to achieve. Occasionally, the artist paints areas of
the finished sculpture with dry pigment, but usually she leaves the natural
faint brown of the flax, as it contributes the gentle time-worn feeling that
reflects her artistic philosophy. The artist notes that she pays careful
attention to archival concerns as part of her working process, and that her
pieces could last for centuries, with proper care.
Those found objects in the jars and
boxes on Ms. Schutter's studio shelves are often encased between the layers of
paper to add visual texture, or incorporated into the structure itself to add
literal texture. Sometimes they simply serve as a design reference for the
shape of a piece.
In 2002, Ms. Schutter's family
relocated to Massachusetts and she moved into her current New Bedford studio
space the following year. She has shown her work at a number of SouthCoast
venues since that time, including a solo show at Artworks! in New Bedford in
2004, and a three-person show at Bristol Community College in Fall River in
2003. She received a prestigious Artist Award from Boston's Society of Arts and
Crafts in 2006. Currently one of Ms. Schutter's pieces
can be seen in "Pulp Function," an exhibit of works of art containing
paper, on display through Jan. 6 at the Fuller Craft Museum in Brockton.She is also a participating artist in
"Tree-mendous," a national juried show of artworks featuring trees,
on exhibit from Aug. 7 to Sept. 30 at the Cahoon Museum of American Art in
Cotuit. She will be participating in this
year's third annual New Bedford Open Studios, scheduled for Sept. 29 and 30.
