Laura Ellen Bacon was invited to be one of the artists featured in this summer’s Ground/work 2025 exhibition.
The artist was on-site in May building a sculpture out of willow beyond the bridge from the Lunder Center where the Nan Path and Woodland trail meet.
The Clark is one of only a handful of institutions globally with a dual mission as an art museum and a distinguished center for research and higher education, dedicated to advancing and extending the public understanding of art. The Clark’s mission and geographical location define three essential aspects of its character and identity: the quality of its art, the beauty of its pastoral setting, and the depth of its commitment to the generation of ideas.
Curated by independent art historian Glenn Adamson, Ground/work 2025 features a dynamic range of outdoor presentations by international artists, Yō Akiyama, Laura Ellen Bacon, Aboubakar Fofana, Hugh Hayden, Milena Naef, and Javier Senosiain that respond to the Clark’s unique setting while expressing ideas core to each artist’s individual practice. Like the inaugural Ground/work, which opened in summer 2020, the installations will remain on view for over one year allowing visitors to encounter the works day or night and throughout the seasons, experiencing them anew as the landscape and weather conditions change. Ground/work 2025 closes in October 2026.
Set throughout the woodland trails and open meadows of the Clark’s distinctive 140-acre campus, the exhibition includes newly commissioned, site-specific installations by six leading contemporary artists. The focus is on global conceptions of craft: the means by which artists transform the world around them.
In Eurocentric art history, it has long been accepted practice to draw a firm line between craft and fine art. In many parts of the world, however, no distinction exists; rather, there is a holistic domain of making and meaning. In surveying craft across cultures and practices, Ground/work 2025 aims to transcend the binary question—"Is it art or is it craft?”—and instead highlight craft as a motor for artistic expression.
The exhibition foregrounds the international diversity in craft, with a range of artists critically reflecting on the traditions that inform their skilled making. The six participating artists represent a diversity of geography, materiality, ethnicity, gender, and generation, and each possesses a craft-intensive practice as well as an informed and dynamic relationship to national or regional traditions, exemplifying the way that artisanal traditions can be reinvented to generate contemporary form and meaning.
Ground/work 2025 is organized by the Clark Art Institute and curated by independent scholar Glenn Adamson.
Ground/work 2025 is made possible by Denise Littlefield Sobel. Major funding is provided by the Edward and Maureen Fennessy Bousa Fund for Contemporary Projects, Karen and Robert Scott, and VIA Art Fund, with additional support from Thomas and Lily Beischer, Girlfriend Fund and Agnes Gund.
For more information visit https://www.clarkart.edu/
