From the Center Outward

By Margaret Michniewicz

Photos By Margaret Michniewicz

Possessing a living essence of their own is how Putney artist Bonnie Mennell seems to perceive her assemblages of found objects. As she talks about them, it is almost with deference, revealing a peaceful and profound respect for life and an understanding that living beings, herself included, experience transitions and passages.

The materials Mennell uses are predominantly natural ones (twigs, leaves, grass; shells, bones, skulls; stones, seaweed, thorns). She unites the objects into larger sculptures bound by a new connective tissue: recycled newspapers, calendars, and other paper that she reconstitutes into her own handcrafted paper. This paper is the foundational substance of her art pieces, created in her basement with the help of half a dozen garage sale blenders -- themselves recycled for a new purpose.

Mennell derives inspiration from the act of collaborating with other living forms in their various stages of existence. Even after she incorporates them into a composition, some of the elements will continue to shift and evolve of their own accord -- cracking here, curling there, extending out beyond their original border. They continue to live and breathe, as it were, and Mennell does not try to arrest their movement even if it later alters the original vision she has for the composition of her artwork.

The soft-spoken artist, who also teaches at the School for International Training in Brattleboro, lives a life of peaceful coexistence. It is symbolic of the truce that Mennell appears to have with the cancer that entered her breast; the “invader” as she calls it. As she describes it, she will “walk with breast cancer as a companion for life.”

In Mennell’s early career, her preferred medium was watercolors. In the last several years though, Mennell has turned away from painting as her primary means of expression, explaining that the action of painting is too much like simply documenting what is there. She now favors interaction with objects that already exist, many even with a life literally of their own. Organizing exhibits, having shows, selling pieces -- none of this is why Mennell creates. It’s as though she draws life, and breath, from the ongoing relationship she has to the elements that find their way into her compositions. Mennell explains that when she began her “journey through breast cancer” she turned during those “unsettling months… even more hungrily to the natural world seeking solace, seeking understanding, seeking healing… hoping to find the meaning of this cancer in my life… seeking, as the writer Terry Tempest Williams has said, to find refuge in change…. To let my intimacy with the natural world inform my intimacy with death… and life.”

An upstairs room of Mennell’s rural farmhouse serves as her workshop, but it’s clear that the art process extends well beyond. All over the home she shares with her husband Paul, objects are arranged in orderly fashion along window sills, the kitchen counter, surrounding the base of the woodstove -- artful compositions in their own right, as they await Mennell’s inspiration for their destiny. These objects may have been picked up from the earth by Mennell herself -- in the Putney woods, or from the sand of ocean shorelines miles away. Increasingly, more and more elements are contributed by friends and colleagues from their travels around the planet. Mennell’s assemblages have likely inspired these acquaintances to see for themselves the inherent beauty of natural objects -- the graceful shape of a bone, the drama of a scarlet-colored leaf, the texture of autumn field grass, the sparkle of mica. The travelers carefully wrap the objects to make the journey safely to Mennell. From there, the artist will transform these treasures into their next life, bound by the artist’s hand-crafted paper and her aesthetic of natural grace.

Healing Legacies

Art and Writing by Women Who Have Faced Breast Cancer

Healing Legacies is a non-profit arts organization dedicated to helping women heal from breast cancer by creating art and writing about their experience. The artwork in the Healing Legacies collection is created by both professional and non-professional artists.

For more information, visit www.healinglegacies.org or call 802-863-3507.