Barbara Earl Thomas in Nantes

In June 2024, Seattle artist, Barbara Earl Thomas, visited the site of the future Jardin de Seattle in Nantes. She will be creating a work of art as the focal point of the garden.

Bio:

Barbara Earl Thomas is a critically acclaimed Seattle based visual artist with an active art making career spanning more than 35 years. She is a skilled painter who now builds tension-filled narratives through papercuts and prints, placing silhouetted figures in social and political landscapes. She draws from mythology and history to create a contemporary visual narrative that challenges the stories we tell ourselves about who we are as humans. Thomas is also known for her large-scale immersive installations and public art works that use light as the animating force and invite her viewers to step inside her world of illuminated scenography. She incorporates language and visual storytelling to embrace the viewer and makes them a part of the narrative.

Since 2020, Thomas has completed commissioned work at Yale University's Hopper College, at the Multnomah County Courthouse in Portland, Oregon and in Seattle Judkin’s Park Sound Transit I-90 station. She has also had major exhibitions, The Illuminated Body, Chrysler Museum of Art, Wichita Art Museum, and Arthur Ross Gallery at University of Pennsylvania (February 2023-May 2024); Geography of Innocence, Seattle Art Museum (November 2020-January 2022), and Packaged Black, a collaboration with New York based artist, Derrick Adams at the Henry Art Gallery at the University of Washington (October 2021-May 2022), as well as a solo exhibit at Claire Oliver Gallery, New York, NY (November-December 2022).

Barbara Earl Thomas reporting on her June 2024 site visit:

I was selected in spring 2024 to create a work of art for the Parc du Grand Blottereau in Nantes, France, to celebrate the 45th anniversary of the Seattle-Nantes sister city relationship. The Seattle-Nantes installation will join a number of site-specific installations that honor sister city relationships and the diversity of our natural world.

In June, I had the opportunity to visit the city of Nantes where I enjoyed a magical week full of creative exchange. I arrived in Nantes to the warm welcome of Nathalie Bekhouche, MilleFeuilles, and Caroline Le Saux. My goal for this initial visit was to visit the Parc du Grand Blottereau and meet Franck Coutant, Sebastien Floch, and Damien Linard, who are the core team members responsible for creating the Seattle-Nantes Sister City Garden. When I arrived at the site, the team members arrived by bicycle ready to sweep me up into their excitement about this new project.

Franck, our illustrious team leader, explained that the installation would be inspired by Seattle’s Beacon Food Forest, which the team was lucky enough to visit on a trip to Seattle in 2022. They were impressed by the food forest concept that expands the use of a public park beyond leisure and neighborhood green space to offer a habitat that also provides edible plants and fruits. As Seattle is surrounded by lakes and water ways, the site at the Parc will include streams, pools and the lush green they provide. Sebastien, our talented landscape designer, has created a garden composition that mingles what is common to parks in both Seattle and Nantes, which will highlight our special twinning.

For my installation at the Parc du Grand Blottereau, I plan to create a welcoming gate, constructed in steel, that will be incorporated into our garden to receive visitors and signal the specificity of the place and the shared relationship between Nantes and Seattle. I will confer and collaborate with the team in Nantes to finalize the design and the gate will be fabricated in the iron works shop on site at the park. I love nothing better than to work with steel workers and artisans who know and love their craft.

I extend my gratitude to Nathalie Bekhouche for being an amazing guide and translator when I needed it. She took me to art openings, and the Nantes Art School where I visited artists as they prepared to graduate. To Mariette Cassourret, president of the Maison des États-Unis for her reception and the organization’s warm welcome. And finally, a grand thanks to the Millefeuilles artist collective that invited me to give a public talk about my work and my ideas for the park.
I am honored to work with this fabulous team and the Parc du Grand Blottereau that lives up to its name with its expansive landscape, miles of meandering trails that move from tropical lush vegetation to forests and open expanses that one imagines as endless.