The Rural We: Alison McNulty
Through sculpture, interactive projects, architectural interventions, site-responsive indoor and outdoor installations, photography, video, and works on paper, Alison McNulty explores the nature of our relationship to the material world. In 2014, she moved to the Hudson Valley and has found great inspiration for her art among the history and geography of the region. In the past few years, she has been creating “ghost columns” made of bricks layered with sheep wool. Her latest work, Hudson Valley Ghost Column 7, is on display at PS21 in Chatham, New York, and is featured as part of the Upstate Art Weekend happening Aug. 29-30.
I made my first ghost column in 2017 for Collaborative Concepts, an arts organization that organizes exhibitions in outdoor settings in the Hudson Valley. I had done site-specific works before, but not for outdoors. It allowed me to think on a larger scale, to think about a piece enduring through weather, and using different materials. I became interested in the bricks made in the Hudson Valley. Living in Newburgh, I saw a lot of buildings where the brick was worn down and falling out of the structures. I was intrigued with the stamps on them, and their history.
I began researching. The clay for the bricks was dredged from the Hudson River, mixed with sand also found there, dried and baked, and put on barges, then shipped to the city. The clay deposits were from the last Ice Age. I was interested in the deep time geological movements that explained the vast clay deposits in the Hudson River because of how this material shapes the landscape. I learned this was the largest brick-producing area in the world in the early years of the 20th century. I found so many different histories intersected in this one, hand-sized building material. It goes really deep — embodied within bricks there’s the social history of immigration and invention, and the labor rights of the people who made these bricks. None of the Hudson River brickyards exist anymore. The material retains vestiges of this history, as well as being something that continues to shape the landscape we move through or live in.
I wanted to contrast the brick weight and density with another material that would make the column feel more animate. I decided to use sheep wool to go between the bricks. Sheep and wool were and still are an important industry in the Hudson Valley. The way the wool is uncomfortably compressed between the bricks relates to the fact that the animal can’t survive without us (they can’t shed their own wool). This interdependent relationship works as a construct of the column. And, because I wanted the column to feel more alive, I placed the wool so that it’s sticking out between the bricks, like it would be on the animal. It helps catch the light. At PS21, there’s a lot of wind and movement, and that little fluttering of the wool and the way it kind of glows around the edges gives it an uncanny feeling. I hope it has a beauty that people are drawn to, but it’s also haunting and mysterious.
I build each of the ghost columns on site and then take them apart brick by brick. It takes a full week to make the outside ones. It’s labor intensive, but it’s kind of a meditative process and puts me closer to the environment I’m working in. For this one, I started building it before the tropical storm, and the morning after the storm I got there and it had been demolished, so I had to start over. But that’s how I work — I contend with the impermanence of things.
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