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“You know, we all are made in the image and likeness of God, and God is creation. So we're all creative, but sometimes I think some of us are given an extra dose.”
Celine Farrell has lived a lot of life, and those words are just a sliver of the knowledge she’s picked up along the way.
She's seen what it takes to get inspired and fired up creatively. At the end of the day, it's why she's kept engaged, making art as a sculptor and beautifying her space as owner and curator of Grove Gallery (she's also the curator and gardener of its grounds). Everything in her day-to-day touches on some form of tactile creation and inspiration from a higher power.
“It should be a part of everybody's life because everybody has — in their being — creativity, and it has to be fostered and nurtured; not that you're raising a bunch of artists, but in our treatment of one another,” she said. “No matter who it is, the dullest person in the world is a creative person because he's given that.”
Sculpture is her main gig, but Farrell wasn't born with artist clay in her hands; she began with Wisconsin dirt under her fingernails and feet as the daughter of a farmer. Even today, that part of her remains present in her life. “To me, the garden is probably more than anything a comfort,” she said, “a comfort and an excitement … watching things grow.”
Although she worked as a farmhand at home, when she was at school, her teachers found her natural artistic skill impressive and sought to foster it. So Farrell's father let his daughter choose her own path, though it differed from the one she was raised with … or did it?
Her belief that nature and art are entwined is clear from her works, especially her latest called “Butterfly Glade” — a gleaming visual ode to the natural world that currently sits outside Milwaukee's Arts @ Large but got its start inside Farrell's Grove Gallery Studios.
“What I sculpt is light and space,” she explained about her most recent project’s beginnings. “That is what I work with.”
“Butterfly Glade” is an artistic juxtaposition of nature's delicate beauty and the strength of a bronze tower dedicated to one of nature's most important pollinators — the source of life for so many of the native Wisconsin plants and flowers Farrell loves. The flowers on the tower, in gleaming bronze, communicate the interplay of nature's elements and, when placed outdoors, is lit up by the sun's light in all its depths.
“If I would use one thing that would state the artistic inspiration for ‘Butterfly Glade’ it is: Live in the moment,” she said. “And it is not only the way I feel about the sculpture itself; it's about the life of our butterfly who is on the top – a monarch.”
Ultimately, how do earth, plants, monarch butterflies, bronze and light all fall into place and align for a creation that honors not only its subject matter, but the process itself?
“The plants exist, and you're moving them around, and the tree and the earth and everything else like that you have to plant,” Farrell began. “But the sculpture doesn't. That's your job. My way of thinking of it is that you are reaching for creation. Spirituality is creation, no matter how you think of it. And you're reaching, reaching, reaching, and sometimes you hit it.”
Farrell's artistry of light and space, along with her love of nature truly honor and enhance the simple beauty found around us. After the sculpture's dedication, she found herself pleased with the result.
“As you mature, it becomes more and more of you,” she said. “You're looking in the mirror. The spiritual mirror, really. Or all your mirrors. And we nurture it. And you literally fall in love with it. I mean, literally!
“As you do something good and it works out well, it’s like reaching for that creation; that part of creation, which is a mystery. God is a mystery, and creation is a mystery, so you don't try to analyze that. You just go for it, because it's too big for you anyway,” she concluded, before adding with a laugh, “[and] I'm not a very big person!”
