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Gualala Arts
Promoting public interest and participation in the arts since 1961.
Archive of past events: 2004 through 2014
The Dolphin Gallery presents an exhibit of the mixed media work of Maggie Bolt and the gourds of Chris Johnson from the opening reception on Saturday, September 1, 2012 from 5:00 to 7:00 p.m. to the show's conclusion on Wednesday, October 3, 2012. Maggie BoltMaggie Bolt finds an outlet for her creative passion in a wide variety of art forms from decorative hand-built clay plaques to monoprints in a variety of media to collages and even hand-crafted cards and miniature bookmarks. However, ceramics remains at the core of her work whether they are hand-built vessels or wall plaques or figurative sculptures.
Like her fellow exhibitor, Chris Johnson, her work reflects Asian influences, especially in her clay wall hangings, kimonos and clay monoprint fabric scroll paintings. African influences can also be seen. After growing up in Southern California she and her husband, with whom she collaborates on mixed media pieces that integrate wood and ceramic materials, moved to the Sebastopol area in the early '70s and has been a part of the local art scene ever since. Besides displaying her work at The Dolphin Gallery she exhibits year round at Local Color in Bodega Bay and the Bodega Artisan Co-op in Bodega.
Maggie shares a web site -
www.gmbarts.com
with her husband Geoff, a wood turner and sculptor.
Chris Johnson
Her passion for working with gourds has expressed itself in her love of teaching about working with them. She has traveled to Australia to teach both basket making and gourd art, and often volunteers to instruct at both basket and gourd guilds in the Bay Area.
Since then she has traveled extensively in other Asian countries and that too influences her art. She also enjoys using U.S. Southwestern designs as well as those found in nature or contemporary expression. Her work with baskets and gourds began in the early 1990s in Berkeley when she attended several classes at The Caning Shop in Berkeley. Later she joined BABM and East Bay Gourd Patch. Currently she serves as BABM treasurer.
The Dolphin Gallery is located at
39225 Highway One in downtown Gualala, CA |
A self-taught artist, Bolt's clay work is highly textured. She often creates her own tools and employs objects found in nature to imprint on the clay.
Chris Johnson is familiar to those who have attended past Bay Area Basket Makers (BABM) exhibits in the Burnett Gallery at the Gualala Arts Center. She was last featured at the Dolphin Gallery in 2009 when she also shared the gallery with Maggie Bolt.
Since each gourd has an inherently unique shape, the challenge is to find the appropriate artistic expression for a gourd. Her penchant for using Asian motifs can be traced to living in Japan in the early '60s.