May 31, 2007
Time flies as UW artist has fun with pig
For Jennifer Carroll, happiness is a gold pig . . . wearing watches.
By day, Carroll “takes care of smart people” as a program coordinator for the Department of Economics, but by night she’s creating multimedia art. And that’s when she’s not dancing, or choreographing or teaching dance.
But about that pig — it’s part of the “Pigs on Parade” event at Pike Place Market. The market gave fiberglass pigs to 100 artists to celebrate its centennial. The mandate: turn them into pieces of art so eye-catching that people will want to buy them.
The porkers came in two varieties — sitting and standing. Carroll’s is a sitting pig, about 4 feet tall and too wide to fit through a standard doorway. Carroll worked on her piece in her garage, patiently applying two coats of red enamel paint to the originally white pig, then adding gold leaf
“What the red does is give it a depth underneath,” Carroll said. “The gold color becomes deeper.”
Gold leaf, she explained, comes in sheets and is afixed to the pig using adhesive. A varnish is applied after the gold leaf. And then there are the watches. Carroll attached between 400 and 500 watches to her pig — everything from large pocket watches to delicate wrist models — but still didn’t come close to covering the surface. Each artist received $500 for materials, she said, and despite donations from friends and bags full of watches purchased at Value Village or Goodwill, she went over budget.
On her pig’s chest are Scrabble letters spelling out “Time flies. Have fun now.” Which is a clue to why Carroll used watches in the piece. She has, in fact, been working with timepieces for a good while. Some of her earliest work consisted of old toe shoes from her ballet dancing days, decorated in various ways. One piece for example, is a shoe with timepieces sewn into the fabric which is titled Bio-Not-Logical — referring to the biological clock.
“A lot of my work has to do with being a dancer, being a woman, the passing of time, the time limit on a dance career or on a woman’s life,” Carroll said.
She said she made art throughout her childhood, but starting in high school she began to focus on dancing. Then, some years back, she moved away for a dance teaching job that fell through, and when she moved back to Seattle she took a job with a company that made mobiles.
“That really developed my manual skills and got me going with lots of ideas,” she said.
This is the second time that the Pike Place Market Foundation has sponsored Pigs on Parade. The first time, in 2001, there were 170 pigs, each in the likeness of Rachel, the market’s beloved piggybank. The event was popular and raised a lot of money for the foundation, so they decided to bring it back for the market’s centennial.
The pigs were on display at the Western Bridge Art Gallery May 18 and 19. And at 10 a.m. on Saturday, June 2, they will parade from Westlake Park to Pike Place Market to kick off the market’s Centennial Street Festival. After the parade, the pigs will remain in various locations throughout the market during the festival. Festival hours are 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. on Saturday and 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. on Sunday.
After the festival, the pigs will head to their summer homes on sidewalks throughout Seattle where they will remain on display through September. Carroll’s pig will be at the home of its sponsor, the Virginia Mason Medical Center.
On Oct. 12, the pigs will be auctioned and all proceeds will benefit the market foundation’s efforts to fund the market’s services for low-income people — the clinic, senior center, preschool and food bank.
Carroll said pigs from the earlier event sold for as much as $20,000, and she’s sure some of the current ones will fetch a pretty penny too. She’s seen them all, and expressed admiration for the imaginative treatments they’ve received. One pig, she mentioned, lost its rear legs in favor of a fin and became a mermaid; another has a bobble head.
As for her own pig, she’s just glad she got the chance to do it, even though it meant lots of late-night and weekend work. “When I’m doing artwork like this, that’s when I feel really happy,” she said. “I get completely absorbed and blissed out.”
To see some of Carroll’s other work, go to http://www.anotherdance.com.
