featured in Lawn D’Arts tour Brockport sculptor and gardener Peggy Hale is one of six local artists whose front or side home gardens was selected by Rochester Contemporary to be part of their second annual Lawn D’Arts tour. The driving tour features artists from Rochester to Batavia who exhibit found and constructed objects along with perennials, shrubs, landscaping material and other material demonstrating an artistic expression with nature. This year’s exhibitors were selected by a jury of local artists, art teachers and museum coordinators. They include, among others, Nancy Turner from the George Eastman House and Marion Faller, Professor of Art at SUNY Buffalo. Rochester Contemporary (formerly the Pyramid Art Center) is a 25-year-old non-profit contemporary arts organization promoting upstate artists. In addition to the driving tour Lawn D’Arts exhibits, a slide show of scenes of nature photographed by Rochester Contemporary members is being presented at the center’s 137 East Avenue location on weekend evenings 9-11 p.m. during the month of August. At each Lawn D’Arts tour location, a brochure is available with directions to the various exhibitions. Additional information may be found on RoCo’s website: www.rochestercontemporary.org or by calling 585 461-2222. Peggy Hale’s garden in Brockport is at 26 Meadowview Drive between Clark Street and the canal. (Clark Street is one block north of the Main St. lift bridge.) Hale has been gardening there about fifteen years creating and expanding perennial beds as time, resources, and inspiration allow. Recent additions to the gardens include a small pond with waterfall that adds a soft soothing sound to the back yard. Some of Hale’s garden sculptures she made herself in classes and studios in the area, others have been acquired from classmates and friends. Among the many pieces of ceramic and metal art in Peggy Hale’s garden scene is one fashioned by former SUNY Brockport artist-in-residence Ah-Leon, a Taiwanese ceramist whose work is represented in the collection of the Smithsonian and many other prominent American museums. Ah-Leon is a master in the 400-year-old tradition of unglazed pottery made in Fixing, near Shanghai. The latest sculpture added to Hale’s garden is a giant cube she fashioned from commonly found metal materials meant to catch the wind and twirl on its axis in the front garden. Several other bits of sculpture blend in with plantings in the garden, in some cases so subtly one is hardly aware they are there until stumbled upon. Especially appealing is a glazed ceramic amphora-like container filled with daylilies. At first it seems the container has toppled over on the walk, but in fact it is created to lie on its side despite a quite obvious and serviceable bottom. Hale first began seriously studying art at the University of Cincinnati while she was doing child protective work. The strain of dealing with abused children and their families led her to search for a creative outlet to help relieve some of the pressure and stress of social work. She continued taking art classes at SUNY Brockport when the family moved to Brockport where her husband, David Hale, is an English professor. She studied ceramics under Bill Stewart, taking each of his courses twice and then moved on to study sculpture and metal jewelry. Most of her current work is produced in the metal jewelry studio these days. She recently had a one-woman show of her metal and ceramic work at Brockport’s Seymour Library. “My parents were gardeners,” Hale says. “My house is very small. I don’t have much room to put stuff inside. When I stopped work, about 10-11 years ago, and my children were grown, I went back to serious gardening.” Hale has two sons, one an information technology manager for an HMO and the other a lawyer. She has three grandchildren. English cottage gardening style is Hale’s approach to gardening. “You crowd stuff in,” she says, “you don’t have to weed so much. I like swapping stuff with friends and neighbors. We trade a little bit of each other’s stuff and make our gardens part of the community.” “Gardening for me is a source of spiritual renewal,” Hale says. “I do a lot of work in my church; I do the art in the winter and the gardening in the summer. I like to focus on found material and what I can do with that material. So, if I have a plant, that’s a found material and I see what I can do with it in a landscaping situation.” “And, I like the exercise, I work hard. It’s good anaerobic exercise.” But, she says, “I can’t work as hard as I used to so I hire some people to come in to help from time-to-time.” “Gardeners learn a lot from each other,” she says. “There’s a kind of reciprocal thing that develops between gardeners. If you walk around showing your garden they may start asking you questions. We share material, but we also share our experiences and knowledge. I’ve found that gardeners usually like people.” |
