The Plant, feature by Hettie Judah
2021
A couple of days after we spoke, Ruth Asawa's biographer Marilyn Chase sent me this extract from the artist's correspondence. In it Asawa recalls her time at Black Mountain College, North Carolina: an experimental art school led by former Bauhaus master Josef Albers and his weaver wife Anni in the 1930s and 4os. In the letter, Asawa's mind then turns to the present, and her husband, the architect Albert Lanier, labouring amid the tumbling abundance of their garden in Noe Valley, San Francisco. The artist's passion for the growing world weaves the two moments together: planting and picking, drawing and recording, a reminder of cyclical renewal, and the natural structures that informed her work as a sculptor.
