Serena Bates: Making Sculpture, Telling Stories

By Carolyn Battista / Photos by A. Vincent Scarano

For Serena Bates, an award winning sculptor, it’s all about stories. She engages with her viewers, her subjects, the people and animals she meets. She finds stories—often “quirky” ones--and she tells them. “I love to tell a story with my work,” she says.

Her work can be seen in many respected galleries, including those of the Salmagundi Club in Manhattan, and also at various sites around Westerly, R. I. For instance, there’s a Bates dog in front of the Westerly Animal Shelter, and there’s the Bates bust of Leonardo Colucci at a popular beach spot. Uh, Leonardo Colucci? Who? Serena grins. “Oh, Lenny!” she says. “He was the owner of the Andrea Restaurant in Misquamicut. When he passed away, his family commissioned the bust.” It’s now a familiar

presence at the bar, as was the genial Lenny himself. His fans take selfies with the bust.

Serena likes to talk about her sculptures— about the cat staring down a mouse, about the rat with a bird skull in its mouth. She also tells how finding a closed-off door in the Hygienic

art gallery in New London made her think of Edgar Allen Poe, and of his raven whose message was “Nevermore!” That led her to create a flock of crows, made of paper and wire, to soar and perch at the Hygienic. They

led visitors to the gallery's exhibit of art that addressed our need to stop harming our planet.

At her studio near the Westerly-Ashaway border, Serena regularly works in bronze, ceramic, copper, resin and stone. The studio is in an old two-story barn, renovated by her boyfriend, Richard Mann, who’d been using it for storage. But, she says, “I took it over, one room at a time.” She credits Rick with being a good sport about losing his space, and renovations continue. The couple even spent Valentine’s Day installing new flooring.

The barn, next to conservancy land, has a backyard along the Pawcatuck River. “I’ve got a raku pit out there, for firing,” Serena notes. Big windows offer peaceful views and provide excellent light for her work. There are some

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comfy couches and colorful rugs, but, she points out, “There’s mostly art stuff,” including kilns, molds, clay, and sculptures (a few by friends, but mostly her own). That sculpture of a woman? “She’s drying out.” Nearby is a dog sculpture in progress. It’s a Dutch Shepherd, commissioned by a friend, a veterinarian who raises that breed. “It’s going to be in resin, painted to look like bronze.” There’s a little copper lotus on a table, and on a mantel, there are three sculpted stone heads, including one of “Virginia—a little Italian lady.”

Serena was thrilled to be included in the symposium where she sculpted Virginia. She’d taken a brief workshop led by Philippe Faraut, a well-known sculptor and teacher. He was impressed with her work there and invited her to join him and other highly skilled artists at a two-week sculpture symposium in Tuscany this past September. It was a rare opportunity for the artists, who tend to work alone, to inform and support one another while working and learning.

Serena, who calls Faraut her mentor, was pleased to notice that when Faraut works, he doesn’t measure. She doesn’t either. “I see where the stone is going to take me,” she says.

She shipped most of her work from the symposium back to Rhode Island, but she wanted to carry Virginia herself. “I brought her home in a salad bowl, in my backpack.” she says. She’s used to meeting challenges, from fast, safe sculpture transport to the larger, longerterm

matter of learning and doing art under often tough circumstances. Her dad died when he was 39, leaving her mom to raise three daughters alone. They lived in Virginia, but her mom—also named Serena Bates—was from the Westerly area, so she moved her family back and worked, first as a waitress, later as a pipefitter. Today she helps out at the studio and also works as a CNA. Her namesake says, “She’s a hard worker. She’s strong. I get my work ethic from her.”

The young Serena was accepted at Brown University, but finances were such that she went to business school instead. Her first job, after graduation, was as a secretary at Mystic Seaport’s Maritime Gallery, a place where now, her work is shown. For years, she worked days and took night classes, mostly at the Lyme Academy College of Fine Arts. “It was small; you got a good foundation, good training,” she says. She spent some weekends working in a foundry, “to learn what to do.” She adds, “I never got a degree, but I got lots

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of experience.” She’s not sorry that she didn’t go to Brown.

“I found my love for sculpting,” she says, after starting out as a painter. Early on, she approached a gallery to show her work, but the gallery owner said, “Oh my dear, you can’t. You have no awards.” Serena went home and fired off an email, arguing that this was wrong, that emerging artists need the opportunity to show work to receive awards. The owner relented; Serena began exhibiting at the gallery, and soon, she had awards.

She appreciates her business training, noting that many artists struggle because they lack that. The sale of a piece is exciting—but she knows well that the sale must help to pay for things like casting and shipping other pieces. Recently such practical thinking led her to make an unexpected purchase at an estate sale. “It was not a planned thing,” she says, but there were five kilns, some 300 molds and a lot of bisque ware, from bowls to figurines. After some walking-andthinking, she figured “Why not?” and bought

it all. She later sold three of the kilns and the molds, to help fund her Tuscany trip. Then she opened a paint-your-own pottery operation (where her mom often helps out) in one room of her studio. “It’s just a minor part of what I

do,” she says, but it helps pay for heat and electric service in the big barn.

These days there are regular shows of her work and that of other artists at the Crow’s Nest gallery, which she manages and where wire-and-paper crows again draw attention.

The gallery is at the Phoenix, a stylish new supper club in an old building in Pawcatuck. Last year Rick bought the building, long neglected and vandalized after a series of restaurants there closed, and took on the vast project of turning it into what’s now an attractive, welcoming place. He says, “I figured I could retire, or I could buy a condemned, 10,000- square foot building and turn it into a supper club.”

This month Serena travels to Little Rock, Arkansas, where she’s been invited to show work in an annual festival at “Sculpture at the River Market.” And then? She’ll continue looking, listening, engaging people, doing sculpture, and telling stories. She says, “People want stories.”

FOR MORE INFO: Serena’s comprehensive website, serenabates.com, has full-color views of her work. It also includes her biography and lists her awards, her gallery shows, and her professional memberships and affiliations. Her phone number is 401-932-9775; studio address is 189 Potter Hill Road, Westerly; office address is 194 Potter Hill Road, Westerly. The Phoenix can be accessed through its Facebook page.