Marielena Ferrer told an audience at the Woodstock School of Art in February that she became an artist “by accident.”
Born into a working-class family in Venezuela, Ferrer said she had always been drawn to art but did not see it as a profession. After fleeing Venezuela for Spain with her children and later settling in the Hudson Valley, she enrolled in English classes at SUNY New Paltz. A drawing class there, she said, set her on a new path.
Ferrer was the latest speaker in the Woodstock School of Art’s monthly “This is America” series, which invites artists to reflect on identity, place, and the American experience through their work.
Much of Ferrer’s talk focused on migration, family separation, labor, and the lives of people pushed to the margins.
One of her best-known projects began with a 23-page booklet of paper butterflies representing immigrant children separated from their families at the U.S.-Mexico border. At the start, each butterfly stood for 100 of the 2,300 children who had been separated from their families. As that number grew, so did the project.
Ferrer began inviting visitors at her exhibitions to help expand the installation. Participants were asked to tear four butterfly monoprints from paper she had prepared. Each person kept one butterfly and left three behind for the artwork. In her installations, the butterflies hang in long clusters from metal frames, evoking monarch butterflies gathered on tree branches in their wintering grounds in Mexico.
Another body of work grew from an encounter with poison ivy.
While visiting the Rosekill Art Farm in Kingston with a class, Ferrer and other students were asked to collect materials for artwork and warned to watch for the plant, which she said does not exist in Venezuela or Spain. As instructors taught her how to identify it, Ferrer said she began to see poison ivy as another metaphor for migrants.
Showing a slide of red-tinged leaves during her talk, Ferrer asked, “Aren’t they beautiful?”
She said she became interested in the way poison ivy is widely feared and targeted for eradication, even as it plays an important ecological role. She learned it is a successional plant that grows in disturbed soil, helps prevent erosion with its dense roots, supports pollinators, and produces high-fat berries that feed birds late in the season.
That duality led Ferrer to think about migrant laborers, including workers in meatpacking plants, who are often socially marginalized while doing dangerous, poorly paid jobs that communities depend on. During her talk, she described factory conditions in which workers can endure long shifts without bathroom or lunch breaks and said some plant floors are painted red to disguise blood.
Her research eventually led her to the ancient Japanese lacquer tradition, which uses sap from the Asian lacquer tree, a relative of poison ivy. Ferrer wondered whether poison ivy sap could be used in a similar way.
Working in gloves, she collected about a teaspoon of sap from a thick poison ivy vine, enough for two artworks. She carved a wooden hand and coated it with 60 thin layers of processed sap, each of which took 24 to 48 hours to dry. The piece took months to complete. She titled it mano de obra, or labor.
Once hardened, the lacquer is no longer allergenic, and Ferrer said she invited visitors to touch the work.
Using leftover lacquer that had hardened into a lump, Ferrer created another piece, preciosa, or precious. A local jeweler cut the material into facets like a gemstone. Ferrer said the jeweler, also an immigrant, understood the work’s metaphorical power.
Her third poison ivy piece is a blanket stitched from preserved leaves and displayed over a section of floor painted red, an image meant to recall meatpacking plants and the labor performed inside them.
Near the end of the talk, Jaime Ransome, who curates “This is America,” asked Ferrer how her work reflects the American experience.
“I’ve been American all my life,” Ferrer replied, noting that the land stretching from Alaska through South America is all part of the Americas.
The next exhibition of Ferrer’s work opens March 14 at the O+ Exchange Gallery in Kingston and runs through April 11.
The next “This is America” artist talk is scheduled for Saturday, March 21, from 1 to 3 p.m. at the Woodstock School of Art. The featured speaker will be Afro-Indigenous artist Destiny Arianna of the Chappaquiddick Tribe of the Wampanoag Indian Nation. Executive Director Nina Doyle said the school expects to schedule another round of “This is America” talks later this year.
Margaret Tomlinson is a contributing writer. You can send her an email at reporting@theoverlooknews.com.