About six weeks into Edd Ravn’s fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center in the fall, he decided to smear his studio wall with mud.
“I was thinking about the idea of a white wall being this supposedly neutral zone to view an artwork,” he says. “And I was thinking, ‘What would it mean to situate this room and identify it as a place within a larger place?’ ” So, he went out to a pond in the Province Lands, scooped up bucketfuls of mud, and lugged it back to his studio, where he used it to turn his white wall a rich sandy brown.
To Ravn, mud is “so evocative and deep and full of possibility.” No two muds are the same — mud from the volcanic soil of Italy is very different from the sandy mud of a Provincetown pond. “If people did this all around the world, you’d have studios of all different colors,” he says.
A place-based approach to art defines Ravn’s work. He draws on a variety of influences in the paintings, sculptures, textiles, and salt-encrusted tree branches that will be showcased for 11 days starting this Friday at FAWC.
Art and nature were guiding forces in Ravn’s life from an early age. His childhood home in southern England abutted a forest that he spent countless hours exploring, building “dens,” climbing trees, and making “extremely bad snares,” he says — an experience that led him to develop a relationship with those woods.
That relationship with the natural world waned somewhat as he got older, he says. He studied art as a profession, first as an undergraduate at the University of Glasgow, then in a master’s program at Yale. While he learned a lot, his art didn’t reflect what he really wanted to make. “I was making what I thought I should be making rather than taking those steps to make the ‘me’ stuff,” he says.
It was only after he graduated, when he spent four years as an artist’s assistant in New York, that he began to discover the art he wanted to make. His earlier connection to the natural world started to re-emerge.
Ravn’s studio at FAWC is filled with natural materials. There’s a bucket of privet berries and melted snow on the floor, a table covered in blue jay feathers and horseshoe crabs and golden reishi mushrooms, jars of earthen pigments, and a centipede specimen with all its legs removed and placed alongside it. It feels like walking into a Renaissance-era cabinet of curiosities.
Ravn gathers many of these finds on his walks in the dunes, which are a key part of his artistic process. “Whenever I’m outside, I’m trying to pick up on cues or lessons of things I could bring into the studio,” he says. In New York, he painted only with rainwater, while at FAWC he uses ocean water and melted snow.
When Ravn collects materials, he usually has no clear idea of how they will become art, he says. Instead, the artistic vision tends to emerge from putting things next to each other. “I’m being constantly infected with the different shapes and textures and forms and histories,” he says. Books of Klallam poetry, Tibetan Buddhist teachings, and postwar Japanese art strewn about the room also contribute to the mixture in Ravn’s brain out of which his art appears. “Often, I’ll be making something, and then it takes me a couple of months to realize where it came from,” he says.
One example is a collection of ash branches that he displays on his mud wall. They are bent back on themselves, and the ends are bound to the main stem with thin wire, forming dramatic looping patterns. The idea was inspired by Ravn’s mother, who is a basket weaver, but it was after he made the piece that he realized the wire binding technique exactly matches the way that tiny vines in the dunes wrap themselves around branches. “There’s definitely a form of mimicry going on here,” he said.
While Ravn’s inspiration is organic, his work is not low effort. He will spend months learning and refining techniques like dyeing, bioplastic manufacturing, and bacterial culturing to expand his artistic repertoire. And these techniques can have impressive results — his studio has a sheet of bamboo paper that he modified to look uncannily like the bark of a beech tree. When asked how he did it, he smiles and says, “Top secret.”
This combination of well-studied techniques and osmosis-like inspiration is clearest in Ravn’s paintings. One is a greenish brown with splotches of purple on the edges, a large burned hole in the center, and creases throughout. The piece was painted, burned, and creased by Ravn, but he created the diffuse pattern by leaving the folded-up painting outside for days to be exposed to the elements. The result, he said, is something that he “wouldn’t be able to do with a brush.”
Ravn says he is conscious of the environmental impact of his work. When he was in New York, he was shocked by the amount of waste involved in making art. “I have a choice at every stage of my practice to try and be more responsible,” he says, which has hardened his resolve to fight the harmful effects of globalization by collecting or growing his own materials.
Ravn also searches for sources of inspiration in spirituality. His father is a practicing Buddhist, and Ravn himself studies Tibetan Buddhism. That religion’s conception of interconnectedness plays a big role in his work. He was raised in the Church of England, whose ideas about nature play a role as well, and his English, Irish, and Norwegian ancestry has encouraged him to explore those countries’ folk traditions.
“If someone walked into the studio and they wanted to talk about pagan rituals, or postwar Japanese art, or biodynamic farming, there are so many different routes into the work,” Ravn says. “I’m super interested in the way people view my work, because it takes me a long time to even slightly understand the painting in front of me.”
Ravn’s work is a collaboration with the Earth. His materials come from the land around him. He will set up a painting, but it’s the sun and rain and wind that give it its visual texture. And natural processes, like vines curling around a branch, become part of the art he makes.
On a walk to the pond where he collected the mud for his studio wall, Ravn considers where his ideas come from.
“I think if there was a genesis, it happened a while ago,” he says, as he looks out across the pond. “I don’t know if I’m working with, as some people say, a demon or a muse. It feels like I’m just building upon what’s already set in motion.”
