Heirlooms: Not Your Grandmother's Garden

As a child I remember exploring every nook and cranny of my grandmother’s house, enchanted by her porcelain figures, collector’s dolls, and silk flower arrangements. There was a great deal of mauve. She tended a beautiful rose garden. She also had a very keen sense of order. So, I was surprised by the truckloads of stuff my dad hauled away after my grandparents moved into a retirement home.

For five decades living in that house, these depression-era people had saved everything. Every knickknack, every extra packet of salt, ancient wrapping paper, desiccated pens … The more the family sorted through it all, the more the mountain seemed to expand. Though they were frugal and reused in what we would call a sustainable way, so much of it – down to the faded silk flowers – remained destined to molder in the local landfill.

Now on display at Transformer Gallery, Heirlooms recalls this very excess and decay in our society. The work, by Detroit-based artist Lauren Rice, consists of sculpted organic forms that seem to explode, puddle, and ooze. The installations are coated in magazine clippings, pieces of old phone books, dripping layers of spray paint, and green-painted sawdust. Decorative butterflies and jewels peek out. Lace ribbons drip languidly and silk roses extend outward in faintly obstinate poses.

All of Rice’s pieces contain ugly and awkward structural elements, such as wires and jutting wooden dowels, juxtaposed with delicate and beautiful features. This is how her work can seem so paradoxical, both formally and conceptually. She has steered away from using real flowers, opting for a greater focus on the metaphor of these objects while at the same time emphasizing their artificial quality. 

The largest work, Beast’s Belly, with many botanical allusions, seems to grow and breathe somehow in its own space. It is large and decomposing. It also somehow brings to mind (for me, anyway) the topic of composting in organic gardening. Gardens are very important to Rice, from the Utopic Garden of Eden, to the urban green space, to the “trauma” of the huge industrial farm. Rice explains that Kenneth L.  Helphand’s Defiant Gardens: Making Gardens in Wartime, has become an important resource for contextualizing her work.  Helphand sets two binaries, the garden as an aesthetic utopia of “soft fascination” and the setting of war: “a dystopic landscape offering no cover or pleasure and laden with terror and death.” In her own work, Rice hopes to explore the space in between these two extremes, “creating a chimera both distorted and beautiful, where strong formal decisions rest beside formal disasters.” 

Rice successfully explores this contradiction both in her sculptural objects and in her two-dimensional work.  It is clear from her collage piece Babble that Rice retains her original predilection for painting. The large piece is alive with color and movement and seems to create a visual echo of Beast’s Belly.  Hovering heavily in space is a rotating, vase-shaped jumble of images, including flowers, reptile scales, feathers, and rendered illustrations of songbirds. To this she adds photographs of jewelry from glossy fashion magazines. Rice admits to being beguiled by these pretty, materialistic things.

Rice’s work has a great deal to say about our own amassing tendencies. Heirlooms come down to us from aging or dead relatives, fancy vases (of styles we would never choose for ourselves) and antique jewelry that soon become part of our large stockpiles of things. With our acquisition-obsessed generation, it is a wonder there are still precious objects in life. We possess and throw away far more than our grandparents ever did, which is also one of their legacies to us.