These are Carols words from the proposal- “I envision the kit placed on a large table in the center of the No. 5 room, with four chairs so viewers can sit and take their time paging through the binders. It would be tempting to also hang a few pieces of actual art on surrounding walls, but I see this as a distraction from the incentive to spend more time assimilating the story from the Catalog.” At the time I thought I would have more time to discuss the installation with her and mentioned that I wanted to follow her instructions as she was masterful at putting together an installation. Carol insisted that she trusted us to make wise decisions and I hope she would approve. As you can see here, we did not exactly follow Carols suggestion pertaining to no art on the walls. We felt including actual pieces would be meaningful to the viewers, especially people who visit the gallery and may be experiencing Carols work for the first time. Our compromise was a room within a room. So please visit us at the gallery as many times as you like during this exhibit, spending time at the table looking at the books Carol so generously left us.

We began working with Carol nearly a decade ago when she proposed an installation in our previous alternative gallery space, the cooler in our previous gallery in Paoli, WI. The show, “Hidden Agenda”, was an intellectual and emotional investigation, large scale multi-faceted art project about living with an ostomy after treatment for colorectal cancer. That doesn’t sound like the recipe for an aesthetically beautiful show but believe me it was. In one of my final conversations with Carol, I told her she could teach a master class in art installation. She had a way of composing a space full of beauty and intrigue. Any message she was focused on was subtly communicated through poetic images. We live in a time when many artists are making work about their personal struggles, their identity, and politics. It can be challenging to successfully communicate these ideas without being overly didactic, losing sight of creating a meaningful aesthetic experience. Carol could create work that was very personal even about subjects that should be heavy, and magically make the viewer feel included in what could be very private thoughts and leave the show feeling elevated. And the final product was always aesthetically beautiful. 

“Hidden Agenda” was loved by the staff and the public and Carol was such a joy to work with that a few years later we hosted another installation titled ”Touch/Stones”. After many years of work focusing on her Art and Healing projects, Carol was back in her black and white darkroom doing hands-on work with light sensitive materials and drawing. Carols words: “One could say it was only natural for me to gravitate to this subject, because if you look at the piece called “Monument”, this jar is one of the many containers of pebbles we found when we cleaned out my mother’s apartment. The stones she picked up on her daily walks. She did this until she was 93 years old, and she had been an avid hiker since she was very young.” 

If stones were always a part of Carols life it seems art was as well. In her retrospective catalogue there is a reproduction of a drawing she did in a Christmas letter to Santa from 1953 asking for a pair of girl scout pajamas and a girl scout camera. The drawing is charming and thankfully she got the camera.

Carols final feature show at Abel Contemporary was in 2021 and focused on her work inspired by the Hunger Mountain Story by David Hinton. Here is a summary of that narrative ” Summit-Gate left her war-ravaged village to establish her mountainside home. In addition to her house, she built a poetry shelter in an  adjacent open field. As the years passed her poetry evolved from written works to collections of leaves that she stored in her library. In the autumn of each year, she gathered her special leaves and placed them in the boxes and shelves that had previously held her book scrolls. Then every winter when the wind and snows came, she released her leaves to blow across the landscape, tracing and marking their way, and becoming her new kind of poetry. I call them leaf poems. Poetry that speaks of being at one with the landscape. And eventually she did just follow one off and didn’t return. “ 

Carols artwork is left for us, like the leaves, released to the world, becoming more than even the artist intended. 

I will leave you with Carols most recent artist statement -  

Creativity is a process, and an opportunity for befriending the unknown. 

Life is a process, and an opportunity for befriending death. 

Each of us is part of a vast continuum, and there is a ripple effect.

Carol and I became acquainted in 2013 when she was looking for a place to show her piece “Hidden Agenda”. The galley was still in Paoli, and we had been showing works in “the Cooler” which was in fact the old cooler from when the building was a working creamery. That space, like the no. 5 space we are gathered in today, was a place where we could show installations, experimental pieces, and more challenging works. Hidden Agenda was a body of work that dealt very directly with colon cancer and living a life with an ostomy, which often was not a subject that was immediately embraced. The work from this show is deeply personal, but as Carol discovered, the message is also universal. The previous year my beloved grandmother had passed away, and in the last years of her life she too lived with an ostomy. I was one of a very select few people she trusted to help her care for this very intimate and personal medical need. When Carol approached us about her exhibition I was immediately receptive. I was drawn to the care she placed on the topic, but also the levity she brought to a subject that most people either don’t know about or don’t want to talk about. 

After getting to know Carol during the time we presented “Hidden Agenda” I was able to see the true depth of her work. She continued to show with us at the gallery and she followed up her first Cooler show with another, TOUCH/STONES, where she again filled the space with a vast amount of work: photographs, limnographs, hand made objects. It was an almost overwhelming amount. I say almost, because Carol was so organized and the show so well planned, that she made it all look easy. She presented a beautiful collection of pieces which contemplate how  something as simple as a stone can mark the connections we make with each other over both distance and time. 

Working with Carol for almost a decade has been a delight. She was always up for a challenge when we presented her with a show theme. Her work was conceptually driven, aesthetically considered, well crafted, and presented beautifully. Not only was she a joy to work with professionally, she has also been an inspiration to me in my own art practice. I have a small piece of her’s in my collection, a piece called “Orical.” This image is the shadow of an outstretched hand, reaching for the light. I had a chance to talk with Carol via email about the inspiration and fortuitous nature of creating this image. She generated the image during a trip to Ireland. Taken at the Clochan na Carraige, which are ancient stone huts found on the island of Inishmore.