Communicating Through Craft: A Profile of Aaron Hughes

this post written by Sarah Parkinson and submitted by Penland Sketchbook

Art, activism, performance, protest—for Aaron Hughes, the lines between them are blurred and insignificant. “All my work is about creating stories and sharing stories,” he explains. “I’m trying to find space for people to bridge the divides we have in our world through art and through stories.”

from “21 Days to Baghdad/Chicago,”  collection

As a veteran who served in Iraq and Kuwait for fifteen months in 2003-2004, Aaron is sharply aware of those divides. His deployment introduced him to a rougher and more complex world than he’d known growing up in the Midwest. “I felt like the ideas from my upbringing, my religion, my country didn’t make sense anymore,” he remembers. “But what did make sense was art. I felt like art was something I could invest in and believe in and put my energy into. It was something creative and not destructive.”

Aaron came home from his deployment determined to use art as a tool to generate conversations and connections about difficult topics like war, trauma, and oppression. In 2006 he graduated from the University of Illinois with a BFA in painting, and in 2009 he received his MFA in Art Theory and Practice from Northwestern University. Then he went on to work with organizations such as the National Veterans Art Museum, Iraq Veterans Against the War, and the Center for Artistic Activism.

In the summer of 2013, Aaron came to Penland for the first time with a Windgate Charitable Fund Scholarship. “I had spent so much time helping others to tell their stories and listening to other people’s stories that I had neglected any kind of personal work I needed to do,” Aaron explains. “I applied to Penland as a part of my transition back to focusing on my own art practice.”

Aaron Hughes artist and Veteran

He has returned to Penland each summer since to take classes in the printmaking and letterpress studios. “One reason I’m super invested in the printmaking program is that I’m interested in the way printmaking and politics can help to popularize language, stories, and movements,” he says. The connection is clear for Aaron: “Your ability to communicate lies in your ability to execute a craft. That’s what I’ve been gaining each time I come to Penland—the opportunity to develop my craft and to improve my communication skills.”

Aaron readily admits, however, that his time at Penland has been about more than gaining skills in the studio. “Penland is a generous space for me as a veteran,” he explains. “It’s a place of transformation and growth and learning. I’ve been encouraging other veterans to apply there because it’s such a healing, generative space.”

When he’s at Penland, Aaron describes himself as a “studio hound.” “I just want to make, make, make, make, make,” he laughs. But Aaron also values the quieter, more contemplative moments on campus. He describes the short walk back from dinner to the print studio: “There’s a little bench that’s halfway. I’ve often enjoyed sitting there, embracing the evening as it approaches and watching the Appalachian dusk. It’s so beautiful—transcendently beautiful. And I just sit in between all this creativity and embrace the present moment of being there. I feel like that’s healing. That’s wholesome for anybody.”

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Penland School of Crafts in Penland NC 

 

Featured Artist: April Franklin

submitted by Penland Sketchbook

April Franklin is back at Penland School of Crafts this winter, and for the first time, her job is simply to make what she likes. A former core fellow, April has previously appeared at Penland as a work-study student, a studio assistant, and an instructor. For the past week, she’s been a winter resident in the iron studio, making (among other things) two Damascus rings:

The rings, we’re happy to note, are for April’s marriage next fall to ceramic artist and frequent Penland instructor Kathy King. The couple makes their home in Watertown, Massachusetts, with April visiting Providence to forge and teach at the Steel Yard, while Kathy teaches at “that school in Cambridge.” April and Kathy met during Penland’s spring concentration in 2012. During the concentration, Kathy (instructor in the clay studio) broke her hand and underwent surgery. All is well now, and the accident “slowed Kathy down for me,” said April, half-joking. 

 During our visit to the studio, April helped current core fellow Meghan Martin with some strategy for a buckle. She also took some time to give a knife-sharpening demonstration this week. April had a dose of dry wit for fellow blacksmiths who specialize, as she does, in knife-making. “Do not tell anyone that you know how to sharpen knives. People will show up with a bag of them.” 

We’ll have more posts here about our winter residents in the coming weeks. In the meantime, you can keep up with the flurry of studio activity on our Instagram account.

Penland "Sketchbook" Visits Tom Shields Studio

This article was written by Elaine Bleakney for Penland Sketchbook, February 14, 2014

Photograph by Robin Dreyer

The chair. A form for one. A group of chairs: a human gathering, a table, a home. Gertrude Stein put it this way: Is there not much more joy in a table and more chairs and very likely roundness and a place to put them.

Photograph by Robin Dreyer

Tom Shields has been messing with wooden chairs—and our domestic contexts for them—for a while now. He collects, breaks, and alters–reworking flat-backs, ladder-backs, whatever chairs he can find by responding to and then rebuilding them into each other. (And away from each other, too.) Even the bank of discarded chairs that Tom keeps as raw material in his Penland studio (below) feels kind of irreverent:

Photograph by Robin Dreyer

It’s not just chairs: irreverence fuels all of Tom’s sculptural “furniture” work. Take this recent commission, made from a group of original Heywood-Wakefield tables:

Photograph by Robin Dreyer

“Blasphemer,” says Tom, grinning as he tells us what one studio visitor called him after seeing the commission. If you’re a mid-century modern junkie, Tom might just be your nemesis. But looking closely, the tables retain their modern context. Form is interrupted and not shattered: the “futuristic” lines and planes are made fluid by Tom’s choices. It’s almost as if the atoms in the birch went haywire and some happy blasphemer came along and set the forms into each other, responding to the tables as potential parts of a larger functional sculpture.



In the irreverence in Tom Shields’s work, reverence. To put a finer point on it: in irreverence, reverent play. Gertrude Stein, another blasphemer, would’ve raised her glass. She said in 1935: A very important thing is not to make up your mind that you are any one thing.
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