Larry North is a working artist, woodworker, and craftsman living in Indianapolis.
Larry will have his piece Siblings, shown at the Sierra Club Hoosier Chapter exhibition, Human/Nature, in October and November at the Indiana Interchurch Center. More information on the exhibition can be found here.
Q1: What is your earliest memory of interacting with nature?
Polliwogs. I'm not entirely sure how it came to pass, but amongst the other stresses of moving my mother was tasked with management of a gallon jar of quite active, young, healthy tadpoles. The memory, although vibrant, lacks detail. Somehow my three-year-old self had convinced Mom that the tadpoles that had hatched in the plastic wading pool were, in fact, of vital importance. There are a batch of mental images, that when combined, attest to the successful rearing and release of tadpoles/frogs. Watching them develop limbs, and become actual frogs is something every three-year-old should remember for a lifetime.
Q2: How does the natural world influence your work as an artist?
My work cannot be separated from the influence of the natural world. Any effort to do so would negate the fact that I work with wood. As an acknowledgement of that, I strive to accentuate the natural character of the particular material I am working with for each particular project.
Q3: What role do you think artists have in helping to promote or protect nature and the environment?
This is a loaded question. Broadly artists have the same role in promoting awareness and protection of the natural environment as anyone else in the general public. At times though an artist does kidnap a small piece of a viewer's psyche. That’s the elusive "this art speaks to me" moment. It's up to both the artist and the viewer to agree on what is being said and heard.
Q4: What message do you hope people take with them from your piece(s) in the Human/Nature exhibition?
When we look at natural forms and objects, we almost reflexively project our image of humanness upon it. We rarely flip that around, and project the natural world on to ourselves. We do the one, anthropomorphize, so fluently and automatically that it's ingrained in our language as a piece of cultural inheritance. And the other, the reflection upon ourselves, doesn't even have adequate language defined to discuss it succinctly.
Photo: Larry North with his dog Rueben outside the shop he co-runs, Badger & the Mouse Emporium, in Indianapolis.
Intrigued? We visited Larry at his workshop to discuss these concepts further.