an interview by Dorothy Pomerantz

Beth Galston's Windows Art Project looks as if it might have fallen from a magical giant tree. Huge balls of seed pods hang in the window of Goodwill on Elm Street like new organic planets creating their own kind of univers,

The Somerville Artists says any resemblance to planets is purely coincidental. With this project, she was just enjoying the shapes of the seed pods and the huge balls they made when glued together.

Galston recently sat down with Someville Journal Assistant Editor Dorothy Pomerantz to talk about her work and how it has evolved from industrial installation pieces to a new investigation of the forms only nature could create.

How did you come up with this work for the Windows Art Project?
    "It grew out of what I was working on in my studio anyway. For the past four years I have been collecting things in nature and making things out of them. I had just finished working really hard on a big proposal for something I didn't get, but while I was wailting to hear I was really nervous and wanted to find something to do with myself that was kind of mindless.
    I had it in my head that I wanted to make balls of stuff just to see what they would look like. That's usually the way projects start."

Did you do anything to tailor the piece to the site?
    "If I had the balls sitting on the floor in the window they were going to be hidden. So the first thing I had to figure out was what to do with the ones that are too heavy to hang. I thought, well, they've got a lot of used furniture here and I wanted to be site specific so there are several things in the window that are from Goodwill."

Is there a message or meaning in the finished piece?
    "Sometimes I start out and I have some larger concept. In this case, I've really been investigating nature and this is part of my investigation. It was one way to see the forms and the shapes. I'm playing with the shapes--I'm putting them together in a new way."

Did you find that you've learned anything from doing this project?
    "I think what I was really investigating and what I learned is that each of the pods has a certain shape and a certain quality and texture and when you put them together, they become even more so.
    This project was not highly conceptual--it was more like, I have these materials, I have this impulse, it was really this gesture of making, this ritualized act of sitting there and gluing them together."

Is this project similar to the kind of art you usually do?
    "Well, yes and no. I was in Phoenix last week, where I'm working on a project. I was hired to be part of a design team working with the department of transportation on a highway bridge.
    I've worked with the bridge engineer to change the shape of the bridge. It's not like I put art on the bridge; I made the bridge into art work. It's a pretty different scale; it's an eight-lane freeway."

Can you explain the changes you made to the bridge?
    "It was a big hunk of concrete that was very dehumanized. I wanted to soften the way this structure was going to look, I wanted to make it look more natural. I did that by rounding a lot of parts of the design and I created some terraced walls that are going to have plantings on them.
    I felt my mission in this project, since it is going right through a neighborhood, is to try to make this a more human scale and less dehumanized."

How did you initially get interested in the merger between art and nature?
    "Well, my work has changed a lot. If you had seen my work six years ago, it looked much more architectural.
    For quite a long period of time I was working with industrial materials and I was exploring the way they interacted with light.
    My work changed about four years ago. I had been doing things just indoors and I got really tired of these controlled white rooms. I thought I had to throw myself into a different arena so I started working outdoors."

So it's been a progression.
    "I've been working at this for more than 20 years. You gain things and you lose things as you change.
    Lately I've been brewing a new piece in a new direction that doesn't have to do with nature. I've done enough work now that I'm thinking about how to combine things."

How did you end up in Somerville?
    "I came to Boston to go to graduate school at M.I.T. at the Center for Advanced Visual Studies. A lot of people were doing very high-tech stuff and I was, for quite a while, working with light. But I never considered myself really high-tech, I've always been very material based.
    I found an inexpensive apartment in Somerville and I've been here ever since. I live in Prospect Hill and actually co-own a house there."

Is your studio in your house?
    "No, it was for a while. Now I have a studio at Vernon Street."

Your studio must be a very interesting place with all that nature inside.
    "There's also a distinct aroma of dried leaves and some of them that are dipped in beeswax have a kind of sweet smell and then there are some pods that I used in a show a couple of years ago from a cucumber magnolia tree and to my nose, they smell like cracked pepper. So my studio has a musty, kind of spicy, slightly sweet smell that I forget about."

Is your art still changing?
    "It's possible that two years from now I won't be working with natural things. I don't like to be fickle, I stay with things until I really know them and then, if I feel like I know what I'm doing too well and I'm repeating myself, I do move on.
    I have been asking myself recently if I am going through one of those times when I'm slightly shifting."