Karen Colett Frank

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Prostitute Judge Karen Colett Frank

St. Petersburg FL

This piece evolved in a rather roundabout way. While incorporating a variety of my skills and interests, it is not typical of my work.

My original intent was to work with my Nature Child archetype. The piece was to include an image of the little girl who grew up on a barrier island along the central Florida Gulf Coast. Densely populated and well touristed, it was a place of lush tropical foliage and flowers, wild parakeets, color-changing lizards, white sand beaches, and endless sunshine. We played outside nearly every day. Today I live in Saint Petersburg, only an eight-mile drive west to my childhood home. The color-changing lizards are now rare, and the wild parakeets a thing of the past, replaced by wild parrots, and in my neighborhood, strolling peacocks.

This was what I wanted to represent. In July we left Florida for our annual retreat to our seasonal home in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom. I did my best to pack the materials I might need for my creation, but I seemed unable to actually execute it one I began. I never seemed to quite have what I needed. My Child refused to play along!

There were many nights when I tried to solve this dilemma before I went to sleep. Amazingly, although I seldom remember dreams, I woke up one morning with a vision of the piece I actually needed to make, as well as its name. It was a crocheted sort of nest filled with embellished stones, entitled Earth Mother.

This made so much sense to me. My Nature Child was a Florida girl. She has no reference points for the Vermont woods. Of course, she would have grown up to be an Earth Mother. (The Mother is one of my personal archetypes.) Everything I needed was right here. It was with excitement and energy that I began.

My life in the rural Vermont woodlands is very different from my life in Florida. During the twelve plus years we’ve worked on building our place, I have developed a bond with the land. The trees and the plants are entirely different. We have wild blueberries, rocks and stones and boulders are everywhere, there are Chickadees and Nuthatches. This is the world Earth Mother comes from.

I used an assortment of yarns to crochet the nest; hammered copper and aluminum wire as embellishments. The stones, pine cone, moss and fungus were collected on our property. I have used two blue jay feathers. The longer one from Vermont for Earth Mother and the smaller one from Florida for Nature Child.

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Earth Mother 2021 2.5" x 6.5" x 6.5" Sculpture NFS karencolett@mindspring.com