ScienceWorks Hands-On Museum / The Farm at SOU

Available for viewing sun up to sun down

Park in the back left corner at ScienceWorks. The artwork is between ScienceWorks and The Farm at SOU.

Science Works was founded in 2002 as a private response to a crisis in public science education, ScienceWorks is committed to inspiring wonder and stimulating creative exploration through fun interactive science. ScienceWorks’ Museum Hours are Wednesday – Sunday 10am – 5pm
Learn more at: scienceworksmuseum.org

The Farm at Southern Oregon University is a center for sustainability. The student-led organic farm produces healthy, sustainably harvested food for the SOU community. It is a hub for education, student and faculty research and community outreach to the Rogue Valley. Projects on The Farm inspire a generation of ecologically-committed leaders who promote a vision of living and working sustainably in community and on the land.
Learn more at farm.sou.edu

Featured Artist

Sari Carel

Mud Songs For Anni

Artist Statement

Mud Songs For Anni explores themes of sustainability and regeneration while paying tribute to the seminal Bauhaus artist Anni Albers.

Built with raw rammed earth, and using natural and recycled materials, the piece highlights sustainable methods, and puts an emphasis on minimal additions to the waste stream.

The Bauhaus movement is associated with utopian notions of abstraction, industrial design and urban living. Less known is the deep inspiration that Bauhaus artists such as Anni Albers took from nature. Albers’ fascination with botanical structures and her close reading of Goethe’s ‘The Metamorphosis Of Plants’ informed her weaving and textile works throughout her life.

In today’s world, when we need to reimagine how we live, build, eat, move from one place to another and discard our trash, revisiting this little-known historical tether between nature and the built environment is at the heart of this project.

For this piece Albers’s small-scale textile piece titled City (1949) is approached as an inspiration and a kind of blueprint for a large, outdoor sculpture made from raw rammed earth. Mud Songs For Anni invites visitors to explore soil through sculpture and this highly sustainable, ancient method of building.

A kind of map inspired by City depicts where elements of the sculpture come from in the original textile. The map is handmade with cyanotype sun-prints, layered with gouache accents and continues to foreground materiality and visual engagement as it explores larger environmental themes.

Why Soil, Dirt and Mud

This project asks us to reconsider and reacquaint ourselves with the very dirt beneath our feet, a rich foundational substance that is rife with cultural meaning and environmental significance.

Soil and dirt are at the core of historical and indigenous traditions of construction and agriculture, which today are also at the forefront of the fight against the climate crisis. Earthen construction methods offer great potential for a substantial reduction of carbon emissions. They are not just the past They are the future.

The dirt beneath our feet is home to a world rich with cultural meanings and ecological wealth and yet we rarely notice it. Mud Songs For Anni beckons us to reconnect with this material and all that it can do.

At the end of the exhibition, Mud Songs For Anni will be dispersed back into the earth. The other elements in the piece will be packed together and saved to be used in future artworks.

Link to Anni Albers City, 1949

A special thanks to the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, Zero Foot Hills, art residence and Aimee Burg, Clay Space Space, Janine Sopp and Nina Berinstein.

Artist Biography

Sari Carel’s is a multi-disciplinary artist and environmental activist based in Brooklyn. Carel’s work has been exhibited and screened internationally in venues such as Artists Space, Dumbo Arts Festival, Nicelle Beauchene Gallery, and Gavin Brown’s Enterprise in New York; LAX Art and Young Projects in Los Angeles; Genia Schreiber University Gallery in Tel Aviv, and Haifa Museum of Art in Israel and Locust Projects in Miami. She has been awarded numerous fellowships and residencies, including C3 Initiative, Portland, OR, AIR at the Stundars Museum, Finland; AIR Vienna; the Socrates Sculpture Park Artist Fellowship and the LMCC Residency on Governors Island, New York; the Bundanon Residency in Australia, and most recently KODA’s Land & Environment Residency in NYC. Her recent public project The Shape Of Play, exhibited in Boston’s North End, was commissioned by JARTS and curated and produced by Now & There. Her solo exhibition, The Sun Is A Mouth Of Blue, took place last year at Melanie Flood Projects, Portland, OR.

A More Perfect Circle, an art and activism project curated by KODA is slated to open in New York this Fall.

Learn more at: saricarel.com