HUNTER & GATHERER
MIXED MEDIA ARTIST
Everything that GAE knows about Collecting Broken Things, she learned from her Grandpa Kline.
In the sixties, she would spend hours in his workshop in the garage- admiring the dirty cracked and dusty treasures that he would bring back from the town junk yard. The shelves that lined the walls were full of old doll heads missing their bodies, the rusty parts of random toy cars and trucks, faded & torn photographs and wooden boxes filled with discarded jewelry & beads. It was a Place of Magic. Eventually the Treasures became hers.
These inherited THINGS, are the kind of lost and found objects that GAE likes to use in her Mixed Media Assemblages and Sculptures. A visit to her Happenstance Studio in Uptown Marion is proof positive that Six Decades Later, the Hedge Apple Does Not Fall Far From The Tree. Shelves and cupboards overflowing with boxes labeled: Keys, jewelry, doll parts, teeny tiny bones, rusty wire, gauges & pulleys, little frames, vintage photographs and bras plaques, fill GAE’s head with curious wonder.
What will she make from This & That, and The Other Thing?
A self taught artist, GAE sharp RICHARDSON has been making art from found objects for over twenty five years. She makes mobiles from weathered bottles and vintage enamelware rescued from the Cedar River. Intrigued with visual story telling, she constructs ladder journals by attaching the gatherings she finds on walks to antique barbwire from Colorado. Worthy of the Runway, GAE dresses mannequins and dress forms in a layered art garments made from mop heads, silver caution tape, brass drawer pulls, and crystal chandelier prisms. She constructs Shadow Boxes out of old clocks that chime the time and black boxes protect vintage framed decoupaged photographs embellished with the whimsical pieces of jewelry.
“If it’s dirty or broken or ugly - Give it to Gae,” her nine siblings say. She’ll figure out something to make from what we all know, is one man’s junk... But GAE’s treasure.
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