BRYANT HOLSENBECK •   DURHAM, NC

Bryant Holsenbeck is an environmental artist inspired by the natural world. She began her arts career as a basket maker. Since that time, she has evolved into an artist who makes large-scale installations that document the waste stream of our society. She has shown her work and taught throughout the United States and Australia. She has been the recipient of 2 North Carolina Arts Council Fellowships, a Project Grant and an NEA Arts and Learning Grant that she worked on in collaboration with the Chapel Hill Public Arts Commission. She is also an independent studio artist who makes books, birds, and other mostly animals sculptures out of recycled materials. She has been artist in residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts, Sauslito, CA, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Sweet Briar, VA and Moulin à Nef in Auvillar France, In 2010 she lived a full year without using single-use plastic. She continually uses what she learned in that year to make a smaller foot print on the environment. Her book, The Last Straw: A Continuing Quest for Life without Disposable Plastic, was published in the fall of 2018 and is available for purchase. She has taught numerous classes by zoom during Covid and will be teaching on sight at the John C. Campbell Folk School in June 2022 One of her greatest pleasures during 2020 has been watching, all the wildlife who live in her neighborhood come out and enjoy the world we share.

 

What are the birds around me saying as they sing their songs? Where did all those robins who are in my yard these days spend the winter? Does the rabbit who stops in stillness when I come out my back door in the late afternoon know that I see it? Is this the same rabbit that I saw hopping across the road to my neighbor’s yard? Will the possum come again this spring and raid the cardinal’s nest? Are the wrens nesting under the studio eaves? Catbirds and more catbirds everywhere. Yesterday, the most beautiful woodpecker, black and white spotted with bright red head came to the suet feeder in my garden. The animal sculptures in this show live in North Carolina as do I. I have seen herons fishing in mountain lakes, in parking lot mud puddles and flying along the Eno river like it was the fastest and safest way to travel. Robins, sparrows and wrens everywhere. Up in the mountains near Sparta the juncos congregate each winter. Snowbirds, they are called. A friend in Tyrell County told me the story of the alligator who lived under the bridge in Columbia, NC for many years. As a human being I am grateful to share a world which is a home for all of these wild creatures. They are excellent neighbors. Here is what ornithologist and writer Drew Lanham author of the HOME PLACE says about the birds around us: “same air, same water, same soil, same earth, same fate.”

And here we are.


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