Kathleen Volp: Stick Season

Kathleen Volp’s installation Stick Season is a celebration of the woodland inspired by the brief period between fall and winter in Vermont when the leaves have left the trees, but the snow has yet to come. In this interval between autumn’s raging kaleidoscopic foliage and the brilliant whites and blues of winter, gray overcast skies bear down on the leafless trees until only the trunks remain visible. The artist’s woodland walks, so full of exuberance in autumn, turn deeply meditative. The eye is drawn to the subtlest blues and greens of mosses and lichens, and every minute variation in the tree trunks—textured barks, hollows, burls, and scars, as well as holes fashioned by industrious woodpeckers.

The works in Stick Season are constructed from carved rigid foam layered with a slurry consisting of variations of paper-mâché, plaster, clay, pigments, and resin. Together they are not intended to be a representation of a forest, but rather each piece is a compilation of specific trees the artist has grown to know and to love.

Originally from Minnesota, Kathleen Volp credits the yearly cross-country road trips her large family embarked upon in her childhood as one of her major influences. Traveling by trailer, the wonder of road-side attractions, cities, state parks, and campsite communities fueled her lifelong obsession with the oddities and cultural artifacts of urban life and, just as an equally, a deep love for the solitude of natural spaces. As a student at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, Volp studied with conceptual artist Siah Armajani and kinetic artist Cork Marcheschi. She later received her BA in Art and Behavioral Sciences from SUNY in New York City. Volp has exhibited nationally, and her work featured in the collections of the New Britain Museum of American Art, New Britain, CT; and the Minneapolis Institute of Art. Along with her beautiful old dog Zoe, she divides her time equally between Cavendish, VT and Waltham, MA.