'Bits of trash' create metal treasures at Cotuit’s Cahoon Museum
Sometimes in a dull landscape or doubtful season, art shows up to make your day. Such is the case with a fine and fanciful exhibit at the Cahoon Museum of American Art in Cotuit.
“Robin Tost: Scrap Metal Quilts,” on view through Dec. 23 in the Cahoon’s upstairs galleries, offers artwork that’s both playful and eye-catching, showing off Tost’s sculptural and artistic talent, skill and imagination.
The Cahoon display of the artist’s creations features 13 distinctive scrap-metal patchwork quilts and several smaller assemblages, as well as three life-size, free-standing metal and wire creatures stationed outdoors and inside the museum.
Another recent piece, created in 2022, is a striking, three-dimensional wall sculpture titled “Kudu Totem,” depicting an African antelope with oversized, twisted horns.
Quilting with scrap metal
Tost’s quilts are crafted from scrap-metal “patchwork” pieces, which she hand-cuts with heavy-duty shears. They’re stitched together using wire as thread, through holes punched with a drill press. Her renovated barn/studio in the Berkshires shows off an eclectic blend of tools, discarded metal pieces and fanciful objects just waiting to be crafted into some larger whole.
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The artist/sculptor grabs color from such pieces as beer advertising signs or shiny olive oil cans and finds texture and beauty in old gutters, bread boxes, colanders, auto parts, food tins and rusted metal sheets. Her artist website bio explains that she’s always “been drawn to bits of trash” and the “variety of colors on discarded things.”
Her designs can grow as “free-form” constructions or may be based on a traditional quilt pattern such as the familiar Tumbling Blocks or Star designs. Often “I don’t know where ideas come from,” she says, as she takes inspiration from a brick walkway or from the pattern of a tile floor. Colors contrast and blend with hinges, keys, bolts, metal washers and radiator covers as she creates each piece, fun to look for and identify on her finished work.
For Tost, the idea for creating scrap-metal quilts grew from a trip through Massachusetts and Vermont, biking in a region devastated by factory closings. People’s yards, she said, often carried signs reading “Quilts for Sale,” as a means to raise crucial income. She began to imagine “combining the ‘masculine’ of industrial waste material ... with the ‘feminine’ art of quilting” and created her first scrap-metal quilt assemblage in 2008.
Despite the fact that Tost’s freestanding sculpture animals are made of metal patches, they are full of personality, perhaps a legacy of her decades of work with American puppeteers Bil and Cora Baird, famous for their “Goatherd” puppet sequence in the 1965 film “The Sound of Music.” Earlier in her career, she also crafted life-sized Papier-mâché human figures for galleries and shows.
Creating creatures in metal
Three of her large-scale scrap-metal creatures are on view at the Cahoon. “Phoenix” takes flight from the outdoor grounds of the museum; “Cecilia the Sea Serpent” surfaces near the museum’s front door; “Spirit Bear” greets visitors from the upstairs gallery.
The frame for her bear was created by a neighbor, artist/blacksmith Rich Wansor, and then the creature’s metal and wire skin was painstakingly attached by Tost to the skeleton, square by square. Inspiration for “Spirit Bear” was taken from the Kermode bear, a cream-colored subspecies of black bear that inhabits areas in British Columbia and figures large in the mythologies of indigenous populations near where Tost grew up at White Bear Lake, Minnesota. Metal stars sewn to the bear’s “skin” pay homage to the starry constellation Ursa Major.
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Tost’s whimsical sea serpent, Cecilia, is 25 feet long and 9 feet tall and takes up much of the front lawn at the Cahoon. Her name comes from a children’s TV show Tost watched as a child called “Beany and Cecil” ― her serpent has a rather bemused expression, as if surprised to find herself surfing grass waves.
Visitors to the Cahoon can find colorful jigsaw puzzles, notecards, magnets and other items in the museum’s gift shop to remind them of this colorful and vibrant show.
IF YOU GO
The exhibit: “Robin Tost: Scrap Metal Quilts”
Where: Cahoon Museum of American Art, 4676 Falmouth Road (Route 28), Cotuit
Showing: 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Wednesdays through Sundays, through Dec. 23
More information: 508-428-7581 or at www.cahoonmuseum.org/
ALSO ON EXHIBIT
“Andrea Moore: An American Artist and Her English Garden”
The Falmouth artist creates a variety of colorful artwork inspired by renovations in the beautiful garden of her English manor house, including paintings, sculpture, fiber art and photography. Through Dec. 23.
“Pauline Lim: Travels in My Armchair”
Paintings, collages and mosaics are fashioned by the artist as she flies around the world from her armchair on fantastical voyages with her imaginary companions. Through Dec. 23.
This article originally appeared on Cape Cod Times: Artist Robin Tost makes metal quilts, creatures at Cahoon Museum
