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Mobile artist Spence Kellum poses with OPENENDED, which represents characters from Alice Walker's short story, "Everyday Use." The mobile is one of 20 on display for Kellum's interpretive art installation, "Articulating Yoknapatawpha," in the Faulkner Literary Garden on the grounds of the Union County Heritage Museum in New Albany.
The first piece Kellum conceptualized specifically for the Faulkner Literary Garden installation was designed for its Eastern Redbud tree, which Faulkner refers to as a Judas tree. BLOOD MONEY features 30 pieces of silver railroad nickels, arrayed over spilled blood-red glass, woven together with an outburst of pink redbud blossoms, and represents Faulkner's typewriter.
HUGE AS AGE was made at the request of museum director Jill Smith, who wanted Kellum to interpret a large Crape Myrtle found in the garden. It features a spiral matrix woven as a single continuous line of pearly white blossoms.
This is a detailed shot of HERODIAS, a mobile named for Arden Herodias, also known as the Great Blue Heron.
This is a detailed shot of OPENENDED.
The first piece Kellum conceptualized specifically for the Faulkner Literary Garden installation was designed for its Eastern Redbud tree, which Faulkner refers to as a Judas tree. BLOOD MONEY features 30 pieces of silver railroad nickels, arrayed over spilled blood-red glass, woven together with an outburst of pink redbud blossoms, and represents Faulkner's typewriter.
Mobile artist Spence Kellum poses with OPENENDED, which represents characters from Alice Walker's short story, "Everyday Use." The mobile is one of 20 on display for Kellum's interpretive art installation, "Articulating Yoknapatawpha," in the Faulkner Literary Garden on the grounds of the Union County Heritage Museum in New Albany.
The first piece Kellum conceptualized specifically for the Faulkner Literary Garden installation was designed for its Eastern Redbud tree, which Faulkner refers to as a Judas tree. BLOOD MONEY features 30 pieces of silver railroad nickels, arrayed over spilled blood-red glass, woven together with an outburst of pink redbud blossoms, and represents Faulkner's typewriter.
HUGE AS AGE was made at the request of museum director Jill Smith, who wanted Kellum to interpret a large Crape Myrtle found in the garden. It features a spiral matrix woven as a single continuous line of pearly white blossoms.
This is a detailed shot of HERODIAS, a mobile named for Arden Herodias, also known as the Great Blue Heron.
This is a detailed shot of OPENENDED.
The first piece Kellum conceptualized specifically for the Faulkner Literary Garden installation was designed for its Eastern Redbud tree, which Faulkner refers to as a Judas tree. BLOOD MONEY features 30 pieces of silver railroad nickels, arrayed over spilled blood-red glass, woven together with an outburst of pink redbud blossoms, and represents Faulkner's typewriter.
NEW ALBANY – Twenty-five years ago, Spence Kellum visited the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art to see a retrospective of Alexander Calder's mobiles.
When Kellum got back home, he was inspired to start experimenting with making mobiles himself.
"I don't like to copy Calder's style for various reasons," said Kellum, an architect. "I like my broken pieces of glass and copper because I can experiment with it pretty fast."
In the beginning, Kellum used florist wire, and his pieces were lightweight and thin. Now, he uses more durable materials, like ball-bearing swivels that can carry 400 pounds.
"The first things I made, I did backward," said Kellum, 60. "I started with the heavier elements and cantilevered that. If you start with the heaviest pieces first, the composition will get pulled down fast. If you start with lighter-weight pieces first, you can spread out more. It's a series of balances until you get all the way to the top."
Kellum's mobiles quickly garnered attention. In 1998, he was awarded Best Sculpture at the Gum Tree Festival in Tupelo, and the next year he earned the Purchase Award at the festival.
Since then, he's exhibited his work at shows in Oxford, Jackson and Tupelo, and won multiple awards at festivals in Mississippi.
Kellum's latest work is on display in the Faulkner Literary Garden on the grounds of the Union County Heritage Museum in New Albany.
"Articulating Yoknapatawpha," an interpretive art installation, has its opening reception and costume party at 6 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 17, at the museum. Participants are encouraged to come dressed as their favorite literary character.
Earlier that day at the museum, Kellum will host two free mobile-making workshops, one at 10 a.m. and the other at 2 p.m. Call (662) 538-0014 to register; space is limited. The workshops will be followed by a pumpkin carving class at 4 p.m. (bring your own tools; pumpkins will be supplied).
"The majority of the works are drawn from William Faulkner’s references to flora in his prose," Kellum said. "In a few instances, sculptures were developed based upon fauna and large tropes found in Faulkner’s literature. As an architect with a master’s degree in landscape architecture, I was fascinated in how Faulkner provided cryptic glimpses into the Southern landscape of his day, gradually immersing the reader both inward and outward."
Kellum has created 20 new mobiles for the garden exhibit, and his earlier works are displayed throughout the interior of the museum. Almost all are available for purchase.
"Most all the mobiles in this show are woven together," Kellum said. "I think of them as a narrative tapestry. I'm trying to represent the plants Faulkner talks about, but also how he frames the plants."
The first composition he made for the show, REDLEAVES, represents both the overall narrative structure of Faulkner’s short story, "Red Leaves," as well as the form of its central natural actor, a cottonmouth moccasin.
Two kinetic pieces attempt to illustrate birdsongs as spatial artifacts. BLURRR concerns chattering blue barn swallows swarming a Chinaberry tree at dusk, while REPEATER mimics a Southern mockingbird recreating a cacophony of other bird’s songs in a pink dogwood.
Mobiles featuring theoretical tactile typing contraptions of Mississippi writers William Faulkner, Alice Walker, Eudora Welty, John Grisham and Willie Morris will also be on display in the garden, as well as a tangental miniseries concerning special works by Walker.
The first piece conceptualized specifically for the Faulkner Literary Garden installation was designed for its Eastern Redbud tree, which Faulkner refers to as a Judas tree. BLOOD MONEY features 30 pieces of silver railroad nickels, arrayed over spilled blood-red glass, woven together with an outburst of pink redbud blossoms, and represents Faulkner's typewriter.
Conceptualized from the same passage and displayed in the same tree, the first typing contraption Kellum actually made for the show was Alice Walker’s accounting device, VIOLESSENCE. Its massive black-studded yellow counterbalance was moulded first, imprisoned within an ancient cage, offset by a grid depicting a fragmented red and blue Confederate battle flag next to a set of nine optical testing lenses, each shaped similarly to Walker’s eyewear, all woven together by a field of flowers colored purple.
"I can make a mobile in an afternoon, although the Faulkner piece was complicated enough that I had to sleep on it," Kellum said. "It takes more time to envision them than to make them. The Faulkner typewriter piece took a couple of weeks."
Kellum, who lives on a sailboat at Pickwick, said he hopes his work piques people's interest enough to actually check out the mobiles, either at the opening reception on Oct. 27, or at their leisure.
"My artwork is a reflection of my own fairly unique morphogenic worldview, which is to say, I seek to understand things from the bottom up," Kellum said. "Both as a naturalist and as a designer, I try to visualize how holistic systems work together, understand how the underlaying components balance each other. I see complexity as naturally arising from assemblages of simpler components."
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