Details of Shared Connection: Mary-Ella
My feet find their way along colorful, pastel chalk-shaded brick, the sun warming them for a brief moment before the clouds tumble slowly over again. The day has been deciding if it wants to rain or not, and as it contemplates, I pass through the buzzing Artist’s Alley. It’s Tuesday, and the place is in full swing, with artists tending to finishing touches on sculptures or paintings, nodding answers to questions from visitors who enter the historic adobe nooks of their studios. They’re experimenting, getting frustrated at tiny details that no one may ever notice except for them. It’s all in the details, and Mary-Ella is no exception.
We’re in her studio, surrounded by the details that make up her 72 years of experience. She grew up in New Hampshire, watching the massive sugar maple trees shapeshift with the seasons, changing from green to yellow to fiery red to bare and snowcapped in the winter. Her parents nurtured her creative ambitions, and although she looks back fondly on the shifting seasons of her hometown, she finds a deep-rooted community here in the Spanish Village. Her eyes soften as she recalls years prior when her car was stolen, full of $200 mats and backings for her prints from her artist neighbor. The next day, he had a small stack for her, free of charge. When his business was suffering, she went around and rallied other artists for donations to keep him afloat. That’s the way things go around here in the Village; it’s an eclectic mosaic of individuals all living out their ideas, dreams, and explorations, none without struggle, but made possible nonetheless by a tightly woven network of people driven to create.
Mary-Ella has spent the better half of the last 20 years in her studio, working on pieces that reflect the people and things she loves: wild animals, family members, close friends, and sometimes just repetitive patterns that get her mind off of the things that lie out of her control. I watch her as she carefully erases a tiny black smudge of stamp ink from her white mat by dabbing fresh acrylic paint on the mark with surgical precision. She admits that she’s a perfectionist, but it never seemed to stand in the way of her experimentation with various mediums such as painting, printmaking, and even making miniature fairy houses out of giant gourds. It’s these gourds that gather the most initial attention from visitors. When they step foot into the place, they’re immediately sucked into a mystical and tiny world.
I’m immediately taken back to third grade, when we were assigned to build leprechaun houses for St. Patrick’s day, where the “leprechauns” left tiny gold footprints on my little diorama, triggering the boobie trap my dad and I had carefully constructed. I can still recall the exact feeling I was left with, wide-eyed, adrenaline sparkling through my veins like the gold glitter marks left on the little green world I had created. I have never been one for fantasy, but this little tiny gourd world sucks you right into someone else’s living space, and all of the sudden, you’re a giant visitor, witness to the intimate knowledge of someone else’s interior life. Miniature artist Thomas Doyle aptly expands on making sense of our curiosity for tiny things:
“Working in a small scale gives me the opportunity to create something that is both 'real' and 'unreal' at the same time. Conversely, the creation of small worlds gives us the illusion of control. In a world that grows ever more faster and chaotic, in a world in which we are bombarded with imagery, artworks in small scales allow us a place of retreat, where time has stopped." - Thoman Doyle for Vice
Mary-Ella points out the "fairies’" design choices: vacated snail shells and other repurposed materials suggest the opportunistic nature of these elusive creatures. Visitors are enthralled– the attention our relentless world demands is stolen and maintained simply by ordinary things, shrunken down to Gulliver’s Travels’ size.
“Every generation often feels like it’s the one that’s falling to pieces,” she points out. Her creativity serves as an escape from rumination, a constructive act that keeps her attention on what she can control and create. Her linoleum-cut prints are full of messages about peace, resilience, strong relationships, and simple things that bring her joy. She’s grateful for this outlet and reminisces about the time when her mother first supported her artistic endeavors. She tells me about the wooden shirt boxes that her mother used to fill up with supplies, giving her a world of colors, shapes, lines, and textures to play with and conjure up.
When it was time to choose vocations, she chose art education, dipping her toes in various mediums to prepare for teaching her students. She admits that her passion for teaching was a bit of a slow burn. She was unsure of the impact of her life’s work, until years down the line she reconnected with some students and learned about how much her courses informed and expanded their creativity later in life. With bright eyes, she lists off the various students that took the arts further than most, a filmmaker here, a photographer there.
Now, she loves connecting with young people as they enter her studio, sparking curiosity as she shares her (and the fairies’) processes of creation. She is obsessed with process, and unlike many artists, often invites passersby to engage in conversations surrounding the “how” of her work. These invitations are moments of shared understanding, of connection to the details. These are the moments she cherishes, and keep her steady on the search for more worlds to conjure up.
