Tara 39;s Craft Studio

[Maybell Hughs]

Whatis something you learned about yourself or your practice at Arrowmont?

Bob: Often time the students are smarter than I am. I think this is the way to do it and in our conversation they have enlightened me in their wisdom. I learn from the students. The two weeks are like a laboratory of research giving and taking information.

Tara: My practice because it is production founded and streamlined in one direction, this time here with the students and getting away from my regular life makes me remember ideas, foundations that I had forgotten and allows me to work in a think tank as a group.

Tara: I feel like my connection to craft not only started with my dad in his quest in making and his hand working, but fast forward to when I was adult and I am very connected to craft in the way I think, investigate, make and challenge every day. And I always strive to make my craft family proud.

Bob: Only recently did I connect the dots, my grandfather, who was German, and my grandmother, were both tailors and had their own tailor shop in Topeka, Kansas. I am doing the same thing, measuring, fitting, sewing, and making.

Bob: High school craft class, making my first ring. (He still has it!) Learning something about making, having an idea and seeing it coming into form. The idea that is in my head, marks on a piece of paper, seeing it actually come into reality, form. That is pretty magical.

Tara: It was the first time I allowed myself to take the time to measure and figure out my way of doing hinges without using the rule book, and using concrete and glass and it all working. The first time I slowed down.

Tell us about your studio space. What is your favorite part of it?

Bob: The studio is a place that I can be playful. Whether it is making a post card, collaging and drawing on it, or breaking a saw blade. I am in total control. It is a small world, but I am in control. Is that ego? It is a place that I feel comfortable and nurtured, and make mistakes. Playful is big.

Bob: Balance in big. You can get big and to live with me is hard, I get out of control with my ego and passion. A younger person might not catch it. Another $500 in the bank is good, but that balance is so much more important. Trying to live life to the fullest. And ego and control can really destroy you.

What special talent would you choose if you could magically gain one?

Bob: I wish I could play a musical instrument and enjoy sitting around the campfire and signing Kumbaya.

Online registration for this program has closed. To check availability, find out about future dates, or if you would like further information, please call 505-983-1400 ext. 111. Also, get the SFW E-Newsletter for updates!

Over the course of four days, Tara encourages deeper connection to your inner voice and heightened awareness of the tools necessary to achieve creative intent. The first day begins with understanding the art historical background of light and its depictions in paintings, before diving into a hands-on assignment of recreating a classical scene with natural light. The second day moves into building sets, where students have the opportunity to practice shaping both natural and artificial light using basic studio lights and modifiers. Day three and four involve a more hands-on, craft-focused approach while further honing lighting skills with ample studio time for students to create their own fine-art still life creations.

Participants must be proficient in digital workflow and custom functions on your digital SLR or mirrorless camera; this is not a workshop that focuses on camera basics. Participants must also be able to download and select images using image editing software for class sessions.

Tara Sellios is a multidisciplinary artist working mainly in large format photography and also in drawing, sculpture and installation. She graduated from The Art Institute of Boston in 2010 with a BFA in photography and art history. Recent solo exhibitions include Infernalis at Gallery Kayafas (Boston, MA), Sinuous at C. Grimaldis Gallery (Baltimore, MD) and Testimony at Blue Sky Gallery (Portland, OR). Her work has been included in several group exhibitions locally and internationally, the most recent being inclusion in Photo Brussels Festival (Brussels, Belgium). She is a multiple Massachusetts Cultural Council Award Fellow and has appeared on the cover of Photograph magazine and Art New England, amongst others. Her work is part of several permanent collections, including The Museum of Fine Arts Boston, The Danforth Museum and the RISD Museum. She currently lives and works in her South Boston studio, where she is preparing for her next solo exhibition at Fitchburg Art Museum in 2024, as well as several across Italy.

On Monday evening, with 72 hours to go before Philip Treacy, the country's foremost milliner, put his latest collection of headgear on show in London Fashion Week, things were getting fraught in his studio; so fraught, indeed, that hard hats should have been issued. The models' clothes hadn't yet turned up, there had been a mix-up in the booking arrangements so one of his favourite cat-walkers had suddenly become unavailable and six of the show hats, requiring at least 60 hours' work apiece, had yet to be started. Some of his 10-person creative team were visibly fraying like a tramp's trilby. And worse, the telephone was melting with calls from the desperate in search of tickets for the one show to be seen at, the most fashionable outing of Fashion Week.

"It's Tara," said one of his team at one point, holding her hand over the receiver as yet another caller hung, anxiously, on the other end of the line. "Tara wants a ticket." "Who's Tara?" whispered Treacy, an oasis of calm in the panic, as he gently adjusted the feather on what appeared from a distance to be a gorgeously plumed nesting bird but was, in fact, a hat.

"You know: Tara," said his aide, sotto voce lest Tara heard down the line. "Tara Palmer Whatsit." "Who's Tara Palmer Whatsit?" he replied, puzzled. "She's a, you know, a...a...a, oh you know who she is, she's, she's Tara Palmer thingy. Anyway she'd simply adore a ticket." "Well, I can't even find a seat for my brothers, they're standing up at the back," he said. "I'm afraid you'll have to tell Tara I'm sorry."

Philip Treacy sounded as if he really was sorry. He would have loved Tara, whoever she was, to be there among the lucky few. And not just Tara. If he had his way, his show would be in Wembley Stadium, his creations paraded in front of 80,000 people. Because he is, he says, on a mission; a millinarial mission.

"I'm really on a crusade to promote the hat," he says. "One of the greatest moments in my work is when I get a first-time hat wearer, a hat virgin, come into the shop, needing something because they are going to a hat function. And I say to them: 'you'll have a great time in that hat'. And they look at me puzzled. But the number of times people have come back to me and said, 'you were right, I had a fantastic time'." His studio in Belgravia is full of party ice-breakers, ideal attire for centre-of- attention seekers. There's a still-life of pink quill pens; there's a mass of red fluff which tumbles down to the shoulders in the manner of a Roy Wood fright-wig; and there's a huge spread of feathers, which radiate out from the middle of the forehead and look like the result of incident involving a peacock's rear end.

But these are his stunts, the witty cat-walk show-offs which attract the flash-bulbs. There are also on display, atop the sleek white mannequins dotted around the place, extravagantly brimmed straw boaters, or delicate white silk numbers so elegant you can see why people have a good time in them; simply because they would make any old dog look as divine as Kristin Scott Thomas in "Four Weddings And A Funeral". They are what Isabella Blow, the show's artistic director and a woman seldom seen without a Treacy on her head, calls "husband catchers." "That's what they are," she insisted, flicking a feather from her brow as she fielded yet another anxious phone- call. "Wear one of Philip's hats and I guarantee you'll get a husband." Not that I was looking for one.

"Issie's got a point, you know," he said. "Some people think hats are silly. But the whole point of a good hat is that it totally changes the geometry of the face. There is no doubt it makes you look more attractive."

As if to prove the point, on the wall above his head is a huge photograph of a woman wearing a fabulous melange of feathers: marriage bait if ever you saw it. The woman is Linda Evangelista, the photographer was Irving Penn and the hat was the second one Philip Treacy ever sold. Which is what you call starting at the top.

"I don't question what it is I've got, or where it came from," he said of his creativity. "I just get on with it and know I'm very, very lucky." Indeed the story of Philip Treacy's rise to the apex of British fashion, to the point where he is the hippest designer in an increasingly significant business, is a short one. From a household in Ireland without any couture connections ("my brothers are things like policemen and counsellors for alcoholics") he was studying fashion at college in Dublin and decided to spend the summer in London pursuing his major ambition in life: meeting Boy George. In order to facilitate this, he got himself a job working in the workshop of Stephen Jones, George's favourite milliner, sewing in labels and linings to Jones's eccentric creations. And it was there that his life took on a new direction: he didn't so much meet George as hats.

"I'd always been very tactile, I loved making things with my hands," he said. "As a kid I made toys, furniture, anything. There's a thrill in making things with your hands. And I discovered with hats-making it's the sheerest of pleasure. There's a very complicated craft involved in making sure the architecture is right and in understanding fabric and helping it to do what it wants to do. Each hat is like a new beginning. There's really nothing else like it." In 1989, after graduating from Dublin, he landed a scholarship at the Royal College of Art in London.

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