Riki Moss brings to her work a sensibility that includes intelligence, a sense of humor, and a passion for global issues. This installation, called “Migration,” uses strong gestural expressions to convey the pain, desperation and passion caused by human dislocation. Photo by Nancy Graff
Editor’s note: This article is by Nancy Price Graff of Montpelier, who is a freelance writer and editor. In This State is a syndicated weekly column about Vermont’s innovators, people, ideas and places.
Sometimes not even a pinnacle reveals what lies ahead. In 2012 a jury for the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., selected the paper sculptures of Riki Moss and Robert Ostermeyer, wife and husband artists, who live and work in Grand Isle, to exhibit at that year’s Smithsonian Craft Show. The Smithsonian’s show, held every April in Washington, D.C., is deemed by many to be the premier craft show in the nation.
The total number of artists chosen each year is approximately 120, and their work ranges across a wide variety of media: wood, fiber arts, metal, glass, found materials, and ceramics.
Ostermeyer and Moss were thrilled. They packed up their sculptures and lighting fixtures and headed to D.C. In a venue filled with breathtaking wood bowls sculpted from tree stumps, glass blown so finely it looked like tinted air, baskets embellished with colors and designs drawn from the natural world, jewelry in bronze, gold and silver beautiful enough to stop a bus, Ostermeyer and Moss’ fiber art stood apart as something novel and arresting.
Partly it was the medium. They worked in abaca, sometimes referred to incorrectly as Manila hemp. Abaca is a cream-colored fiber harvested from the leaves of a tree species related to banana trees.
Ostermeyer and Moss bought it in sheets from a company in New York City and then, once it was in their studio in Grand Isle, pulped it for up to seven hours, then reconstituted it into wet sheets, and covered armatures they had made from metal and wire. As long as the paper is damp, it remains pliable and durable, a thin fabric with the texture of chamois. As the abaca dries, it shrinks on the sculptor’s armature and becomes as taut as a drumhead.
The participants in Riki Moss’s “Parade” installation are the “what ifs” of evolution, creatures that over eons of time did not make the cut. But in many cases the differences between Moss’s creations and the animals, insects, and plants that did survive are minimal. The result is a parade of creatures that suggest both the passage of time and the vulnerability of the natural world to catastrophic change. Photo by Nancy Graff
Partly, also, it was the designs, each influenced metaphorically by natural forces such as wind and water, and physically by gravity.
Those were heady times. Moss and Ostermeyer had moved to Vermont permanently in 2006. They purchased land and a retired railroad station that a previous owner of the land had moved into place at the north end of Grand Isle, and they began to transform it into a house. They built a studio that resembled the train station and worked at their art.
Success was meteoric. Moss had moved temporarily to Provincetown for three months to finish a novel, and Ostermeyer was left alone in the studio. There, he began experimenting with the abaca paper, dropping in lengths of filament and layering the paper so it would shrink into abstract, anthropomorphic shapes.
“Robert understood how it worked,” Moss explains. “It was amazing. Embedding objects in the paper, he understood that the paper would shrink around the armature and create its own folds. And then he came up with a beautiful way to make lighting.”
They created fantastically shaped lights, including some that looked like peony blossoms on steroids, all of which glowed softly when a light bulb was buried inside. They called their company Studio Glow. They began, as Moss says, to make a living.
Riki Moss and Robert Ostermeyer, of Studio Glow in Grand Isle, were thrilled to be invited to show their sculptures and light fixtures at the Smithsonian Craft Fair in Washington, D.C., in the spring of 2012. Working with abaca paper, they had invented ways to make large, sturdy installations — in this case, approximately 4 feet by 2 feet — from a delicate material that could be lit from within. Photo by Nancy Graff
When invitations to showcase their work began arriving, they took to the road, ferrying their sculptures and lighting fixtures to prestigious craft shows in New York City and Philadelphia, and eventually to the Smithsonian.
“In two years we had risen to the pinnacle,” says Moss. In a soft voice that belies the disappointment she and her husband soon faced, she tells what happened next.
“We just hit it at the worst moment,” she says. “We weren’t prepared for how expensive it had become to participate in a national show — up to $5,000 for fees and transportation and photographs, plus time lost in the studio, plus shipping costs. Our work was expensive and big, too big for apartments, and the economy had fallen apart. Nothing was selling. It was more than a disappointment. We were crushed for a while.”
Fortunately, when Ostermeyer and Moss regrouped, both had other skills a to fall back upon. Ostermeyer returned to social work, working full time for a Chittenden County agency, something he had done before the almost magical qualities of abaca paper had come to him one day in a moment of inspiration. Right now he spends his free time stripping the wainscoting in the part of the train station that will soon be a spacious kitchen with bucolic views of woods and a pond, but the workshop with its hundreds of gadgets and tools awaits the day he can once again draw on his creative side.
“I was able to go back to my old work, which was quite freeing,” Moss says. She began working on a smaller scale, further exploring ideas she had pursued before she and her husband reached that pinnacle.
A former potter and encaustic painter, however, she didn’t want to return to her old ways. At one point in her past, she had gone to Boston to get out of pottery and into painting, but after 12 years as a painter, she was back in Vermont and ready for a new challenge.
“I felt that the objects in the painting needed to get out of the wall, so I started sculpture,” she says, fully ready to inform her new work with her intelligence, sense of humor, and passion for global issues.
Riki Moss is still wrestling with how best to embed masks in walls. At the moment they are best compared to death masks, faces covered in abaca paper that clings like dry skin to the armature. Sunk in sheetrock and plaster, they emerge as unsettling and unsettled spirits from the netherworld. Photo by Nancy Graff
The threads that started running through her work years ago merged with the skills she had developed working with abaca paper. The new work is edgier, more political, and emphatically moral. Foot-high figures of fantastical beasts and plant life look as if they have been shrink wrapped in abaca paper in her series “Parade.”
These are not representations of animals we recognize, but forms that look hauntingly familiar: three-headed birds, human-like forms with humped backs, lopsided plants. It’s as if tiny bits of DNA from known life forms warped slightly in some distant past, creating reformed plants and animals that, Moss says, “didn’t quite make it.”
To suggest the eternity of evolutionary time, Moss embedded masks of faces in the walls at the start and end of her installation last winter at the Living/Learning Center Gallery at the University of Vermont. These faces are both witnesses to the incredible parade of natural forces at work and to the degradations mankind has wrought on the environment.
In downsizing the vision of their future after their spectacular success, Riki Moss elected to work on a smaller scale, too. The red figures in “Migration,” each about eight inches tall, tell their stories through the tension in their bodies and elongated limbs. With the abaca paper shrunk tightly to their wire frames, like skin, and without individual distinguishing features, every figure is every person who has ever been displaced by world events. Photo by Nancy Graff
Moss’ sculpture “Migration” also focuses on moral imperatives. Human figures as thin as pipe cleaners and wrapped simply in abaca paper rely solely on gesture to express the tension and desperation in their lives as they clamber over branches, groping their way toward something outside the audience’s view. It is not a sculpture that speaks to the viewer; rather, it screams. And Moss plans to expand it to include birds and insects.
In the two and a half years since the Smithsonian Craft Show, Moss has regained her footing. Vermont, she says, has been good to her. Her work has appeared at the Burlington Book Festival, in a show called “Images and Voices of Hope” at Peace Village in Haines Falls, New York, at UVM and at Goddard College in Plainfield. These shows enrich a resume that already includes shows at venues such as the Shelburne Museum, the Wood Art Gallery, Norwich University, the Kasini Gallery in Montreal, the Holland Paper Biennale in Rijsvijk, and the Citizen’s Gallery in Nagoya, Japan.
There will be more shows.
In the meantime, Moss says smiling, “Don’t be afraid of failure because it always opens up something else.”
Nancy Price Graff of Montpelier is a freelance writer and editor.
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