Prolific collaborator, as both teacher and artist, Pamela Moulton (Franco-American, b.1961) tries to foster an ethos of generosity and creative exchange through making art and collaborating with multi-generational communities both near home and faraway, like Albania and India. Pamela’s installations are playful, large-scale, hands-on, and exploratory. Moulton is a multi-disciplinary environmental artist rooted in world-building and collaboration. She recently collaborated with over 5,600 community partners, including lobstermen, neuro-divergent patients, schools, artists and many more in her TempoArts installation in Portland’s Payson Park. Her interactive spaces may be crawled through, climbed upon and occupied—allowing the public to explore its environmental consciousness in a direct, material way.
Pamela’s recent energetic sculptures and woven environments are built from abandoned fishing equipment, known in the industry as ghost gear. Her ambiguous sculptures and installations are reminiscent of macro and microorganisms often gone unnoticed or unseen by the human eye. The accessibility and joyousness of this work lends itself to a greater consciousness about the fragility of our ecosystem and inspires better futures worth imagining.
The sculptures and installations act as a record of time: hours spent salvaging ghost gear, tying knots, talking to fishermen, teachers, scientists, and artists. For Pamela, this work is never finished, it is born when the materials are collected and evolves continuously. The labor-intensive processes and community engagement that go into creating the work are equally important to the installation viewers arrive at. Moulton describes the collaborative process like an intuitive dance with the material, allowing participants to respond in real time. The hands that have gathered, unraveled, tied, woven, painted, touched and transformed these materials are truly inseparable from the objects. There is a rhythm to the process of making and the heartbeat of this work is the local community.
The concept of community members as collaborators continues after the work is installed. The invented spaces encourage the public to gather and engage in creative events, including dance, music, poetry, picnics and meaningful discourse. Theatrical concepts saturate Moulton’s practice, who has previous background in teaching contemporary dance and working in set design. Her human-scale environments prompt viewers to react viscerally. Costumes are provided to viewers as an invitation to become active performers in the space. The interactive pieces spur the public’s consciousness through activities of exploration and play. Moulton’s art acts as an elixir that transports you to a child-like state of mind, awakening your curiosity and senses.
