Karin Higgins/UC Davis photos
Design professor emerita Gyöngy Laky's new show focuses on waste and war
(Editor's note: UC Davis Professor Emerita Gyöngy Laky (pronounced "JINGE (as in singe) LOCK-ee") is exhibiting a show, The Difficult Subjects of W: War-Waste-Want-Women, at the Nelson Gallery through March 19. She will speak on the exhibit at a talk sponsored by the Consortium for Women and Research noon-1:30 p.m. Thursday, Jan 26, 3201 Hart Hall. The consortium is sponsoring a yearlong program on Women and the Environment.)
I am interested in making a small dent by changing attitudes about the environment. The question of what we consider waste is both intriguing and problematic in our throwaway culture as is America's voracious appetite for the world's resources.
Drawing upon basic, humble forms of construction, my work is related to the realm of textile architecture and innate human ingenuity. Fascination with simple, improvisational constructions such as basketry, scaffolding and fences has led me to experiment with structures and materials emphasizing these clever linear arrangements.
At the same time, I have always felt an affinity with agriculture, especially the food aspect. I suspect that there may be some connection here to my early days at the family's vineyard in Hungary. It was a favorite place for me...far more than our home in the Buda hills. I have a few lingering visual memories from when I was 3 to 4 years old…maybe even as young as 2…of piglets, orchards, grapes, barns, etc.
Mud and wattle houses
When I went back to Hungary for the first time in the early 1980s for an exhibition of my work in Budapest and an artists' workshop in the countryside, I found mud and wattle houses and barns and storage buildings (still in use) built much like some of the constructed architectural textiles I create today (sans mud!). I must have seen these when I was a child.
This theme of agriculture continued for almost three decades when, as a UC Davis professor, I drove past the orchards along Interstate 80 several times a week. I came to appreciate every nuance of the growing cycle from the tiny new trees protected in milk bottles (a great example of reuse/recycling...another major theme in my work and interests)… to the breathtaking instant when the black lines of branches drawn against blue sky erupted into blossoms… to the lush and cooling aspect of full foliage as Davis and surroundings inched up to 100-plus degrees.
One day I was driving home, westward. A large, fairly young orchard just south of Davis had trees that were waist high now, but still needing a bit of help so the grower had tied each to a stake with transparent green tape. The sun was shining low through the green tape making it glow as if each piece was radioactive. I almost ran off the road I was so taken by the powerful visual drama in this arrangement.
Tons of tree trimmings
Gyöngy Laky has taken advantage of UC Davis' agricultural surroundings to make her art, using trimmings from this Davis orchard, among others. (Gyöngy Laky/photo)
I also witnessed many tons of tree trimmings each year between San Francisco and Davis. Such a beautiful sight. What I saw on the ground at pruning time was wonderful hard woods— walnut, almond, peach and others. These are the same raw art materials that you will find used (or composing) the works in my show at the Nelson Gallery.
Farmers burn these pruned branches, a topic that relates to one of my main issues and themes: environmental degradation. Burning is still a preferred method of getting rid of pruned branches each year, even though growers now have to get specific permission and burning is permitted only on certain designated days. I think it is still the cheapest and easiest way to rid the orchard of this unwanted debris. Much particulate matter goes into our air as a result. On my winter rides home, I often smelled the smoke in the air.
These agricultural and environmental themes, however, developing through the past 20 or so years, increasingly moved me to express my worry about, and discontent with, the world around me. More and more often, using simple language and words as sculpture, my work has transformed basketry into vessels for meaning, associating the pieces with issues beyond just my concern for the rising threat to our environment.
A future for sustainability
The most fun I have had in teaching and curriculum development was when, just before the turn of the century, it suddenly struck me that environmental concerns and sustainability in design would be the major underlying issues of the future.
If our students did not begin to focus on this as the foundation for their work, they would not be prepared for the fast-moving and profound changes coming in the 21st century. I realized that they had to begin by understanding and embracing the overriding context of the material and built world in which they would design.
On the home page: UC Davis sculptor Gyöngy Laky stands in front of Globalization IV: Collateral Damage (2005), now being shown at the Nelson Gallery on campus. (Karin Higgins/UC Davis photo)
The campus, with its many disciplines and divergent points of view, has both constantly challenged me and forged in me the courage to try out new ideas, take risks, ask hard questions and stand up and be counted when dissent was necessary.
Today my WAR series is a core theme in the studio work I produce. I do not want to see future generations in the same wartime cradle I slept in as a child. I am forever an optimist. I believe that education can lead to a better and more peaceful life for all of us and for our planet. I believe that alternatives to waging war are possible, but it takes hard work and a willingness to reach out to people who may hold extremely different views from our own.