Artist and UA graduate student Claire Lewis Evans is partnering with Black Belt Bamboost to open a bamboo park called “Signs of Life,” adjacent to Kentuck Park in Northport. The opening celebration is set for Sunday, Nov. 11 from 2 p.m. to 4 p.m.
“Working with my hands is central to my work as an artist,” Lewis Evans said. “Although I am fully a denizen of the digital age, the physical integrity of uniquely handmade things gives solidity and delight to an increasingly disembodied way of life.”
Lewis Evans said “Signs of Life” emerged after an extended period of drawing without reserve or judgment that began shortly after mounting a solo exhibit of cast metal and paper sculptures in the Kentuck Gallery in Northport.
The beginnings of this project came about when Lewis Evans began paying attention to doodles that she makes on various scraps of paper, and she said this helped her explore her artistic impulses and led to her deciding she needed to begin making art with her hands again.
After finishing a show with Kentuck in January, Lewis Evans said she began to think about what was next and was eventually approached by Black Belt Bamboost to contribute a sculpture to the garden, which she said snowballed into much more than just one sculpture.
Lewis Evans said working with bamboo had never occurred to her until Black Belt Bamboost encouraged her to play with it, although this was initially not her intended material choice. She had started converting some of her three-dimensional drawings and doodles into sculptures using what Lewis Evans labels as “linear materials,” and this often involved basket-weaving materials or welding.
“Bamboo turned out to be the perfect medium to achieve the types of marks that have been developing in my work over the past year,” Evans said. “The project began to really take off when I learned to work with the bamboo.”
Jamie Cicatiello, a public relations representative for Black Belt Bamboost, met Lewis Evans at Kentuck Art Night, which eventually led to Cicatiello asking Evans to create a sculpture for the bamboo park.
“The group has always seen the sculptures as Claire’s project. and we trusted her artistic vision for her project, so we were just there to provide moral support and whatever she needed in supplies and help,” Cicatiello said. “It’s a great feeling to help an artist show their unique work in a unique setting that hasn’t been seen before.”
The goal of the park is to allow individuals in the community the opportunity to learn about and explore all of the varied aspects of bamboo through a diverse array of artistic, cultural, educational and recreational opportunities throughout the year.
Black Belt Bamboost aims to show the community the diversity of bamboo and how it can be a catalyst for a new type of agricultural development in Alabama, specifically the Black Belt Region of the state.
The garden is also intended to bring public attention to the possibilities of developing a bamboo industry in Alabama, showcase the full value cycle of bamboo and the possibilities for creating downstream industries and provide an opportunity to explore an alternative energy source.
The park consists of 200 acres that was given to Black Belt Bamboost by their parent organization, Friends of Historic Northport, and will host 15 different species of bamboo.
“[What] Black Belt Bamboost gave me was both field and a material with the quality needed to define it according to my hunch,” Lewis Evans said. “The challenge, now that the field is ready and awaits, is to go out and make art to bring this magical space and the bamboo park into creation.”
