Serra Victoria Bothwell Fels
 
Tessellation N.514.2018
 
2018, Lath

Made from the wooden lath once used to create plaster walls. Reclaimed from the house during renovation in 2018

Serra Victoria Bothwell Fels (b. Knoxville, TN) works in site-responsive sculptural installations embedded into pre-existing architectural and spatial contexts. Her sculptural interventions and outcroppings transform mundane architectural features into sites of imaginative disruption, unexpectedly shifting our sense of reality and revealing the significant role environment plays in our perceptions of being.
 
Initially trained as a social psychologist at Stanford University, then as a metalsmith at the Appalachian Center for Craft, Bothwell Fels received her MFA from Columbia University. Her work has been presented at venues such as the Palais de Tokyo (Paris), The Clocktower Gallery (NYC), Pioneer Works (Brooklyn), University of Wisconsin (Oshkosh), BRIC (Brooklyn), Sun Valley Center for the Arts (Ketchum), and Smack Mellon (Brooklyn). She is the recipient of the Peter S. Reed Foundation Award, two Windgate Fellowships, a 2019 NYFA Architecture/Environmental Structure/Design Finalist Award, and a grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts.


http://www.svbf.info/

 
About Tessellation N.514.2018:
Tessellation is made from lath– the wood originally used as substructure for plaster walls– reclaimed from the walls of the Wedding Cake House during the 2018 renovation process. Collected then scraped, denailed, and ordered in size, the lath was then made into triangle shapes by Fels along with community members during a woodshop workshop led by the artist. These shapes were then connected to one another to form a tessellating geometric grotto out of what was once the bones of the house itself.