Santa Fe artist Colette Hosmer is celebrated for her work with organic media—preserved minnows, articulated animal skeletons, life-cast creatures, and earth. Using them as materials for her mixed-media work, she has created worlds in which the shells of formerly living creatures exude life and preserved beauty. In making her art, Hosmer has skinned and dissected hundreds of amphibians, mammals, reptiles, and birds. To her the process is as sacred as life itself—the concentration so intense, the smells so profound, that her every pore is penetrated. “Then,” she says, “I enter a space where nothing outside comes in. It’s a moment I can’t plan or design, but when it happens it’s my gateway to the creative source. I don’t know where the process is going, I just follow.” An exhibition—Feast—will be on view at the Center for Contemporary Arts in February, 2007.
China
In 2000, Hosmer was invited to China to participate in a gathering of artists and scientists—a community that crossed borders and cultural lines—from all over the world, who were examining the connection between art and science, and their mutual potential for elevating the human condition. Hosmer placed cast replicas of her feet at the Great Wall of China and under one of her monumental sculptures, a ten-foot-diameter globe of stainless steel fish, which became a multi-faceted mirror that reflected the world around it.
Feast, Life, and Death
In 2006, Hosmer visited China for the sixth time, for a six-month residency in the city of Xiamen, renowned for its music and visual arts. She arrived with no preconception of the work she would create. For many years Hosmer has been fascinated and intrigued by the role that food plays in defining the human condition, and so, while in China, she focused her attention on the many levels of meaning invested in the meal and the banquet. She discovered “wet markets,” which offer customers a variety of fresh food—much of it in the form of live mammals, fish, fowl, amphibians, and crustaceans. In these markets, Hosmer witnessed the acceptance of the congruence of life and death. Hosmer would make a purchase at the market, take the item to her studio, make a mold of the object, and then cast and refine a maquette. The transformation of the maquette into porcelain, stone, bronze, or fiberglass was accomplished by collaborating with local craftspeople and artisans. And since food does not originate in the marketplace itself, Hosmer traveled into the countryside on an ongoing search for the source of the food. On one small farm in Fujian Province, she documented on film a predawn ritual in which a hog becomes dinner. From this visit, a film, Pig to Market was made and became part of her body of work—Feast—that was exhibited at the Chinese European Art Center in Xiamen. In Hosmer’s words,
“The feast is what delineates the line between animal and food, between reality and the illusory.”
