Thursday, February 16, 2012 at 05:03PM This week I started teaching a new set design session for the winter interns at Double Edge Theatre. Sculpting blindfolded is always an adventure and takes the emphasis off design and puts us in an emotional response or touch responsive mode to the materials. The results are surprising, especially when the final product is not the sculpture itsef but the shadow it creates.
Wednesday, February 1, 2012 at 08:46PM Walling In from Nancy Milliken on Vimeo.
This video is a documentation of a public outdoor installation by Nancy Winship Milliken of a wool pasture fence surrounding sheep. This sensory oriented installation firmly roots the viewer with a sense of place. It intersects the convergence of man, nature the environment and art
Monday, January 30, 2012 at 11:57AM Just finishing with some lovely last snow shots by Jeff Derose
And then it came down, always a bittersweet moment.
First we needed to get the sheep back into the fold.
Thanks to Nicki Robb, Jeff Derose, Keith McCormick, all of the students at Hartsbrook school, Margot Milliken, and Sarah Bliss for all their help.
Tuesday, January 17, 2012 at 02:32PM I went to visit the wall today and found the snow brings about a whole different character to the installation. It levels everything out. It is wonderful to be working collaboratively with the elements. They bring about such surprises and gifts.
Monday, January 16, 2012 at 02:16PM This weekend we went to see our friend and colleague Bryan Nash Gill at his opening at Berkshire Museum in Pittsfield, Mass. His work is a result of his intimate interactions with nature.
This show will be up until May. The prints pictured here will be out this spring in book form.
Monday, January 9, 2012 at 10:49AM Inspiration comes to us at the most unexpected times, often years after the event occurs. It could be a conversation, an image in the paper, a statistic, or a refrain of music that drops in on us and feeds our work. In one instance, I was working in the field on my latest installation and my mind revisited a particularly moving performance that I watched two years ago of a contemporary ballet duet by Lar Lubovitch Dance Company at UMass Amherst. I have thought about the inspirational communication and expression that was exchanged between the two dancers as it applies to my own work. There is a dance between the materials and myself, the environmental factors and the installation, even the sheep and my work. Even though you cannot see the dance production, I would like to share the music and perhaps you can experience it through listening. Incipit Vita Nova, for Male Alto, Violin, Viola & Cello, Anne Marie Dryer.. album Bryars:Vita Nova. Enjoy
Wednesday, January 4, 2012 at 02:42PM 
www.nancymilliken.com is now officially socially plugged in. You can follow news of upcoming events and inspirations on twitter, facebook, or rss feeds. If you have any questions or requests please contact me through this website.
Tuesday, January 3, 2012 at 08:55AM Monday, January 2, 2012 at 12:06PM Public Outdoor Art Installation by Nancy Winship Milliken
Click here for more images and conversation
Day One
…… Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
what I was walling in or walling out…..
Robert Frost, Mending Wall
This sculptural event was installed for one month at the Hartbrook School in Hadley, Massachusetts, during which time the community participated in weaving wool into a wire substrate. Wind and rain will participate too, changing the character of the wall as the community is building it. The wire has been kept loose so that the wind creates a billowing and undulating affect as if the wall were alive. Eventually the fence will enclose sheep in their pasture and we will witness the sheep walled in a textural, familiar environs that they will blend in.
Photo by Jeff Derose
When the students at the school are introduced to something unexpected, like wool woven into chicken wire, the first question I inevitably hear is WHY?! I love this question, because it is one I ask of myself, and also one I answer with other questions, such as what if?.... What will it look like if we build a pasture fence out of the very material that is gathered from the sheep? What will the wind and rain do to it? Can the community build it too? And an idea blossoms into a material object that is textural, experiential and process oriented.
When I was in Wales I would walk over the land of the sheep farm where I was staying, and find tangled bits of wool in the landscape, clinging to wire, branches, crevices of rock walls; the residual history of the sheep in the landscape. Here, in New England, there are fences and walls of every type of material, protecting, containing, and delineating property and borders. These two thoughts are the germination of the project, but as with all art, it is only the beginning.
The sensory experience of feeling lanolin on one’s hands and smelling wool is as much a part of this art piece as looking at the texture and watching the wind play with tendrils of loose wool. On the first day of participation in this project the participants curious questions fell away as the experiential process of the installation answered the all- important question of why?
