This week on State of the Arts, the bonds of friendship form through artistic expression, a massive sculpture made from an unlikely material, and a painter captures climate change on canvas.

These stories coming up on State of the Arts.

Hello and welcome.

I'm Mary Paul.

This week we have three stories to share with you about the different places artists can take their inspiration.

We begin with two friends whose bond is made stronger by their hands-on artistic pursuits.

From watercolor to printmaking, from bookbinding to abstract acrylic painting, Carol Neal and Penny Pemberton of Reno, Nevada are lifelong students of the visual arts.

After retiring from nursing, Penny and I decided to pursue watercolors.

We both have an insatiable appetite to learn.

From watercolor, we went into glass, glass fusion, stained glass, mosaics, and then we went into printmaking, I believe.

And we've done reposé, we've done polymer clay, bookmaking, of course, and our next adventure is going to be in beadmaking.

Every time we take one workshop or we do one project, it leaps into a what-if and why not?

And I wonder, we bounce it off of each other and we get so many different ideas.

To just stick with one medium would be suppressing that little voice that wants to jump out and explore and be playful.

The biggest part of our relationship is the playfulness that we have together because if I get an idea and I tell Penny, she'll say, "Yes!"

and then we can do this and this and this, and then we'll say, "Well, how can we learn to do that?"

And then we start a whole exploration.

It's like we have our own university here.

Everything that we do leads to something else that's exciting.

[music] I did an abstract acrylic art painting.

As I was looking at it, that little question creeps in.

What if I could take this painting and make a multi-block print out of it?

So today I'm going to be working on one of the blocks that required learning yet another new technique, which is lino block etching.

We did multiple experiments to learn how to get the lino to print in a very diffuse way that's not cutting.

[music] I like the idea that I could repeat it, that I could play with different colors if I wanted to, as I did with the Goose Lake print.

The original key block was going to be black over color.

And actually I have to give credit to Penny because red is her favorite color.

And she said, "What if you print the key block in red?

How would that look?"

So I said, "Well, let's try it."

When I changed the key block to red, it just kind of erupted.

Our eyes just said, "Oh, that red's got to stay.

Forget the black."

And that's a difference, one of the differences in printmaking.

You can play around more than you can with watercolor.

[music] We approach a project a little bit differently from one another, but it always ends up the same.

For example, if I'm making a book, most people will put the glue on the book with a brush, very precisely.

I put a glob in the middle and I rub it on with my fingers.

My fingers are my best friend.

That's how I do it.

To make a book, you buy book board.

It takes three sheets to make eight signatures, and a signature is a folded portfolio of three pieces.

Then I glue down the cover paper.

I make the edges, and I do that by coming in like this and pushing it.

That'll make one edge.

After that, you start binding.

This one I started, particularly has beadwork.

I punch the holes in here to match the holes that I make in the cover, and I start to bind.

And that's how the binding ends up.

Then I decorate.

From there, we start journaling.

We start sketching.

Wherever we go, we take our journals and we document what we're doing, the date, where we are, and we always do some kind of a sketch.

That's where all of our favorite memories are stored.

Journaling has become a really important part of our lives.

How the combining of the artwork happens, we were invited to go take a bookmaking workshop, which we did.

But it just so happens at the same time, we had finished doing some reduction lino prints, and we had also just finished fusing some glass beads.

So I said to Penny, "Why don't we take our prints and use our prints as the decorative cover rather than store-bought decorative paper?"

And then you say, "Well, how can I incorporate my glass into this?"

So we started making books with inserts of our glass fusion projects.

That became exciting.

We took the glass beads that we made and we incorporated them into the binding.

So it starts off, we're going to learn to make a book, but we can cover it with our prints, and we can decorate the spine with our beads that we made.

Then we embarked on doing a series of paintings in watercolor, and then doing the very same painting in printmaking.

And so everything just kind of ends up fusing together into one final project.

It becomes an adventure that we share, and we bring our own personalities to it and our own thoughts and ideas.

And nine times out of ten, our thoughts will be in synchronicity.

I much prefer creating art with Carole because it's always a very loving, exciting relationship.

The end product becomes both of us.

It's very gratifying to work on it together.

Some sculptors work in clay, others with wood.

Letitia Bahuyo, a Filipina-American sculptor and art professor, saves discarded materials from the landfill to probe questions about what we value.

Her latest work is a massive 40-foot long installation made of thousands of discarded CDs.

Go a little further this way.

Do you need more bungees?

So nice!

I often get asked, like, how long does it take to make these?

There's the answer of, like, how many hours here at this site.

I recognize how much went into all of the collecting, the tying.

But then there's also all of the prep before then just figuring this out.

So even though this is this piece, it took all the other ones to get here.

[Music] Oh, Friends Season 4, Season 6, Disc 4.

I tend to often joke that the line between a sculptor and a hoarder is a very small line.

So I'm basically knitting the biggest, most awkward sock as I put these sculptures together.

My name is Letitia Bahuyo and I'm a sculptor.

So that way it's like over, under this projection and that direction.

I am a little bit of a materials junkie.

I look for voices inside each of the materials and find a way to be able to incorporate them into a new object that they become, but still retain something of their original identity.

I don't want to hide what they are, I just want to sort of highlight it.

And then I combine those objects together and kind of like a visual poem.

I basically will take a stack of CDs and I'll drill four holes in it and then those holes become the anchors and I stitch those together to make strands.

This sculpture is specifically for the Art Now!

Biennial Exhibition at the Oklahoma Contemporary Art Center.

And it's going to be a site-specific installation.

So it's a large sculpture, but it can only be built in that site.

It's built and designed based on a Hot Wheels track, like the loop that a Hot Wheels track would make, or a roller coaster.

It's kind of like weaving or knitting.

So I'm basically making my thread with CDs and then I get to weave those together like a basket.

But in this basket, each of the threads, again, are all of these memories.

The memories that we have of the disc where you recognize, "Oh, I watched that movie."

And so I weave those together onto a substrate.

These can't stand alone, they need some kind of structure.

And so one of my favorite parts to do is to design the different armatures, the different skeletons.

Sometimes it's an inner skeleton, sometimes it's an exoskeleton, sometimes it's a little bit of both.

Depending on what the specific site needs.

And it varies based on everything from installation timeframe, budget, size of their door, how long the show's going to be up.

All of those things go into the recipe and the magic mix where I have all these logistics and then I get to design for that site.

So Art Nals are a biennial exhibition we have here at Oklahoma Contemporary.

Really a celebration of Oklahoma's creative ecosystem by featuring some of the best contemporary artists who are not only living but working in our state.

I've done many drawings and then plans, but it's not until you're actually here and you find out what the parts around you are.

Come in this way, lift up.

I like that because then I get to continue to explore and design it on site.

So right now this is what I'm envisioning.

I would like it to lean, if possible.

So that way when you're standing in front of it, it feels like you're in it.

So after we talk about exact placement, the first thing that we'll need to lift for is to do those mounts.

[Music] Yeah, go into the second one.

If it does look like it, we might later might go to that one over there.

When we were attaching the initial ratchet straps to pull the piece in whichever way we wanted it to, there's a few different tries of repositioning the I-beam clamps in a certain way.

It might be six inches over here or it could have been two inches the other way.

The Leticia was very, very hands-on and working with her, collaborating with her.

We never ran into an issue.

There was always a way to solve it.

We worked together and we bounced ideas off of one another.

Very rewarding.

It was a milestone in my life.

Bring this up a little higher though, because that means that these two right now are at the same height.

I grew up in southern Illinois.

A little rural town, about 7,000 people.

My dad's from the Philippines.

He moved to the US in 1968 during a time when there weren't enough doctors in the Midwest.

My mom was a resident nurse.

They had a little ER romance.

They moved to Metropolis to raise a family.

Being in this multi- generational, bilingual, multicultural household in this quiet landscape created some joys but also some complications.

That has a lot to do, I think, with my work I do now and the way that I spend time thinking about each object and whether or not it's wanted or included.

My goal, minimum of today and heart of hearts, my goal would be to get all of the armature set and the ratchet straps changed out for cable.

Once all of that's done, I can start using the bends of all the tied together CDs and start filling in the gaps between.

I think we should be able to get there.

I don't want to jinx it.

In my particular curatorial practice, I was intentional about choosing a wide variety of materials and mediums and how those specific materials really pushed the boundary of their traditional ways that they've been shown.

Leticia's specific installation is going to invite the audience to not only look at the form, this beautiful, massive architectural form that she's making, but also think about their relationship to the CDs and DVDs that she's strung together to create this piece.

I think at the heart of it, it's a dialogue about value allotment.

What is it that we find to be important?

We tend to be a pre-fickle society.

We change our mind a lot.

And so what is it that had been our favorite song yesterday or maybe the most desirable approach to communication?

And then it hasn't changed, but we have.

But it's not its fault as a material that it's now just in this junkyard.

So you can find that there's a hole in it.

The outside, yeah.

So that's where we... yeah.

So my expertise is in hanging theatrical scenery and lighting equipment, audio equipment over people's heads.

So in here, in the art space, I use that to hang different types of big, unique pieces from ceilings and stuff like that.

Leticia's great.

She's an amazing artist.

I've learned a lot working with her.

And then just being a part of her experience and figuring it out was very, very fun and very cool to be a part of.

You like that?

Right.

Getting closer.

I've just learned that I would be able to stay late today, which is like magic words.

I teach tomorrow at campus.

So I want to make sure I have enough energy for my students.

But if it can help set Thursday and Friday up to be even more just copacetic, that would be good.

I've been a professor for 24 years, and that has been part of my making almost as long as the making as far as a professional artist.

And so the two for me are really connected.

Then there's my smot moving and then, yeah, just a straight cut.

Does that come okay?

I find that my classes aren't classes where I'm necessarily teaching somebody how to make sculpture.

I can see it going a couple of different directions, but they're actually empowerment classes, and we happen to make sculpture along the way.

Pretty much everyone in this class has already taken beginning sculpture, so they've learned their way around most of the tools in the shop.

But now what do you do with those in a more independent way?

When we get started in the semester, one of the things I look for is what is it that their goals are for this term?

And how can I help them individually but as a group that we still continue to work as a team?

So what's going on right now is I'm finishing up a few more of the bar structures that go between those basket tubes.

And so I'm now up in the top right area.

They're almost all secured.

And so I'm finishing those up while Christian is up on that ladder.

And what he's doing is he's changing out the ratchet straps and replace them with the aircraft cable.

When I'm using the CD, I'm borrowing what they usually would do and giving them this other life, but I'm also keeping them out of their waste stream.

And so I try to find materials and ideas that I can use that minimize my carbon footprint.

That doesn't mean, again, I can save everything, but I think the more cognizant we are about the choices we make and what we use, it will help as we make further choices and be aware of our existence.

A word that I avoid and I try not to use is I don't use the word talent.

People often say, "Oh, you're so talented."

And it's a way to say that, "Oh, I can't do that.

You must be so talented."

If it's a compliment, but in many ways it discounts your individual ability to take the chance to do it yourself.

That you can do it, but it takes time.

I very much believe in the commitment of time, the commitment of work.

Nice.

Yay!

So I still did a few zip ties in that one section underneath right there.

But other than that... This goes all the way back to when one of my friends taught me how to knit.

I didn't know how to knit.

She was knitting one day.

I was like, "Can you show me?"

It was years and years before I ever made one of these sculptures.

And so I just recognized I wouldn't be doing the work I'm doing now if it wasn't for so many people along the way.

And so I very much believe in thanking your mentors.

But then as soon as you can, I think that you might actually be on the other side of that table, and you actually can lift up someone else.

How is it that we can help bring people to the table?

In Florida, in the heart of a changing coastal landscape, one artist captures the delicate balance between nature's beauty and its transformation over time.

Her story explores art, resilience, and the urgent call to adapt to an ever-changing environment.

Artists often see things that other people don't see yet, because they just look more deeply at the natural environment or whatever environment they happen to be immersed in.

I've been here 25 years.

It is a potentially threatening environment here.

It's a very dynamic environment where things can change quickly because of natural forces beyond my control.

This is a painting depicting the ghost forest that's located at the end of Broadway Road here.

I call this the Ghosts of Broadway.

It starts out with large pine trees that are still very much intact, and yet as the road goes lower, you can see certain trees dying back on the edge of the woods because of the saltiness of the soil.

I didn't know what I was seeing when I first moved here.

I just thought, "Oh, that's pretty.

That's very sculptural."

And now I realize more what it's about.

[music] This is called the ghost forest activity.

They're just aligned in the way that they're falling down because they will have roots that draw toward the fresh water and toward the landmass and shorter roots heading toward the saltwater.

It's just too salty for big trees to grow anymore, and that's just it.

Pine trees in the distance, they will be the next front of trees to go.

It's a viable ecosystem, but it's changing.

Before, I never saw the redheaded woodpeckers, for example.

Now there are so many insects in the dead trees that the redheaded woodpeckers like to come in and hang around here, too.

My pond.

It started out, actually, as kind of a depression, a natural drainage area, and I did get a permit and dug it out deeper because I saw the potential for making a little ecosystem there.

I've always loved small aquatic animals, like turtles and frogs specifically.

They're just my thing.

This is a hand-painted 10 by 12 foot floor cloth.

It depicts a lot of the creatures that live in and near my pond.

And this, in particular, are four frogs looking together, and you can kind of see their faces there.

And here's a couple of tadpoles placed in that design.

This is a flood zone.

So the pond, which started out as a freshwater pond and had many freshwater aquatic animals in it, is now changing over as we've had more frequent saltwater overflowing into the pond.

When I saw a blue crab in my pond, I thought, "This is weird.

A blue crab is a saltwater animal.

How can they be living in my freshwater pond?"

And I realized then that the salinity of the pond must be up pretty high.

We had about a foot of water, flood water, on the property at that time.

This land-dwelling turtle couldn't walk fast enough to get out of the floodwater.

I found it just floating around, and I guess it just didn't know what to do.

I thought that really says something about the plight of these upland animals being overcome by the salty floodwaters.

What do they do?

Can they survive?

During a major storm, it could have as much as two or three feet of water in the yard.

I would like to try to live here as long as possible.

The house has been raised up four feet from its original foundation.

I have my propane tank anchored down so it won't flood away, and the studio, too, is built out of the predicted flood hazard zone.

I don't want to be foolish.

In the meantime, I consider it sort of adding relevance to my work, that I'm willing to suffer some inconvenience in order to document the changes in the wildlife, document the changes in the landscape, document the challenges that are required for people to live here, and maybe be able to pass on some advice for those who are interested about how not to panic, but to live more sensibly and more in harmony with nature.

We're going to have to adapt if we want to survive.

[Music] Thank you for tuning in with us here on State of the Arts.

I'm your host, Mary Paul.

See you next week with more art stories from around the country.