Lauren
Levy's house doesn't look like the other houses in her Shoal Creek
neighborhood. Wine bottles stick out from posts in the front yard
to form folk-art bottle trees, the brilliant azure glass mirroring
the sunlit sky. A dozen or so brightly colored bowling balls border
a flower bed.
The
43-year-old mother of two is surely the only woman on the block
who spends a weekday morning in her kitchen dyeing pounds of vintage
buttons a bright shade of green, then laying them out to dry on
cookie sheets on the sunny back porch next to the pot that one of
the family's cats has staked out for a nap. And Levy may be the
only Austin artist to request that a studio addition to her house
be designed in such a way that she has a straight line of sight
to the family room so she can keep an eye on her 11- and 7-year-old
children.
Of
course, none of this is really all that surprising when you consider
that the sculptures Levy creates -- infant-sized works made of thousands
of vintage buttons strung on wire and then formed into symbolic
figures -- don't look like anything else in the local art scene.
What's more, three years after she started professionally exhibiting,
her work has become a hot commodity. At D. Berman Gallery, where
her sculpture is currently featured in an exhibit, she is a big
seller.
Levy's
beguiling sculptures may be so appealing because they are at once
familiar and unfamiliar, domestic and eccentric -- not unlike Levy
herself. The petite, energetic native Austinite lives with one foot
in the home and one foot in the creative realm.
The
road to her success has been circuitous. After studying art at the
University of Texas, she headed to nursing school. "I felt
like such a blank slate during art school -- like things really
weren't coming together for me," she says. "And so I figured
I needed a profession that would provide me with a decent income."
After nursing school, Levy took a job in Santa Fe, N.M.. And then
she started knitting. "It was cold and it was expensive to
do things in Santa Fe and I needed something to do with my hands,"
says Levy. "I couldn't just sit still -- I have to do something
with my hands."
Yet
her knitting needles produced more than the usual mufflers and pot
holders. She'd create wildly inventive patterns, sometimes using
as many as 200 colors in a single complex garment. And when she
was finished, she would unravel it and start again. "It was
just about the process of making something -- figuring out how to
do it, and how to do it again," she says. "It wasn't about
the final product itself."
A
few years later, after she had married (her husband, Marc Levy,
is a physician), Levy became interested in metalsmithing. She wanted
to mimic the techniques of knitting: how threads can weave around
each other to form an entirely new object, how you can make a familiar
object out of an unexpected material. Or maybe, as her current work
suggests, she was striving to make an unfamiliar object out of a
familiar material.
But
her forays into metalsmithing came to an abrupt halt when she had
her first child. "Suddenly I had no time to make anything,"
she says, noting that every time she fired up her torch she would
have to put it down and tend to her baby. Nurturing and creating
sometimes conflict with each other.
She
had to find something else to do, some way to feed her need to make
things with her hands. "I just felt possessed, I had so much
energy and drive, but I had to find a way to channel it."
A
lifelong devotee of junk stores and antique shops, she started to
collect buttons. "There's nothing like running your hand through
a big pile of old buttons," she says. "They conjure up
so many thoughts: They speak of the loss of the people who used
them and also the loss of their own function and value as objects."
Sorting
them by color became a meditative task for the new mother. Drawing
on her experience knitting and metalsmithing, Levy began stringing
beads on wire, then weaving them onto wire armatures. It was a type
of art she could create while mothering -- working on them for a
few minutes here, a few minutes there, keeping the buttons and wires
tucked into plastic containers out of reach of the baby.
From
the beginning, Levy's button sculpture resembled child-sized figures
-- and many of them still do. Others look like recognizable household
objects, such as potholders or cups. And still others are imaginary
-- though anthropomorphic -- forms. Yet Levy's chubby "children"
are empty -- the figures really garments without a body. And her
other pieces, though beguiling simply in the sheer number of buttons,
are rife with a sense of absence.
These
are pieces that are not quaint evocations of family life. Rather,
Levy has imbued them with her adult ideas and emotions. "I'm
interested in the mysteries, the dichotomies of life," she
says. "The joy of belonging and pain of not belonging, the
thin line where presence ends and absence begins, where elation
stops and fear takes over."
Which
is, perhaps, why Lauren Levy's house doesn't look like the other
houses in her Shoal Creek neighborhood.
jvanryzin@statesman.com;
445-3699
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Back to previous page.
