WILD whimsy Anne Lemanski’s fanciful patterned creatures by LIZA ROBERTS
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f you’ve seen any of Anne Lemanski’s cosmic, colorful animal sculptures in person, you know they look as if they might twitch, or pounce, or slink on by. The skins that cover them, psychedelic prints and unexpected patterns, somehow add to this unlikely effect. Perhaps her multihued tiger, or her fierce ocelot, or her amazing rabbit, has emerged through a looking-glass portal from some magical realm and wound up in our own? You’re not far off. Lemanski’s Spruce Pine studio is an otherworldly laboratory of creation where she doesn’t just make an animal, she learns it inside out. She studies its physicality and psychology, figures out how its haunches tense when it sits back, how they loosen in a run, how its brow might scowl at distant prey. Then she replicates all of that with copper rods she bends, cuts, and welds into a three-dimensional sculpture, an armature. In an upstairs studio made of shipping containers, another act of creation happens, guided not by realism but by
intuition. Here, she will create a skin for that armature out of digital photographs or prints or collage or all three, and print it on paper. She will draw and cut a pattern as if she were making a dress or a suit, and sew it all on, piece by piece, with artificial sinew. Her tools — wire cutters and an X-Acto knife — are the same, simple ones she has used for thirty years. She has no assistants. On a warm spring weekend, Lemanski is learning mink. Her giant mastiff, Dill, sits nearby. Photographs of mink in every position and resolution surround her, filling a wall and every tab on her computer. She’s learning about what mink eat, how they’re bred for coats, about the recent killing of 17 million Covid-infected mink in Denmark. “Millions! I’m not exaggerating. I was horrified,” she says, shivering. The armatures for a few mink in different positions are underway; one is complete. She holds it in her hands. “The armature is the most important part of capturing the animal,” she says. “I ripped this apart three times; finally, it just clicked.”
She will draw and cut a pattern as if she were making a dress or a suit, and sew it all on, piece by piece, with artificial sinew.
36 | WALTER
courtesy Anne Lemanski (BUNNY); Lissa Gotwals (LEMANSKI)
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