Winning, Piece By Piece By Piece

When Dawn Holder heard her name announced as the winner of the River Valley Invitational during the June 5 opening reception, her first reaction was "just surprise and excitement."

The Clarksville resident is a first-time entrant, but she says she connected to the show's theme of home and is always looking for opportunities to show and share her work with people in the community.

The 66th annual River Valley Invitational at Fort Smith Regional Art Museum was open to professional artists nationwide and is on display through Sept. 14, Executive Director Lee Ortega says. It has been in existence since the museum's inception in 1948. Artists had to submit a work that communicated the idea of home for them, along with a paragraph further describing the idea, Ortega explains. Several mediums are featured -- including paintings, works on paper, sculpture, large-scale installations and photography -- among the 52 works created by 43 artists, most of whom are from the Northwest Arkansas region, Ortega says. A few submissions are also from Florida, Mexico and Texas.

All of the works are for sale, and they can be purchased at any time and picked up after the show ends in September. The invitational is a fundraiser for FSRAM, with half the proceeds going to the artists and the other half going toward funding exhibitions and educational programming at the museum, Ortega says. Last year's event raised about $5,500, she adds.

Holder's winning work is a large-scale installation called "Suburban Lawn Iteration III," measuring 2.5 by 74 by 156 inches. The piece is an installation made of porcelain, featuring about 75,000 blades of grass, Holder, 37, says. This is the third version of the installation, and the original one was created for a conference called the National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts and installed in Houston. She had thought about addressing some of the ecological issues and creating false environments that don't belong in the space they are created for, noting how people try to manipulate the environment.

"A lot of the work that I do is about the way that human interaction changes the natural landscape," she says, adding that the piece itself is "kind of obsessively made."

It took her nine months to create, beginning in the summer of 2012.

"I had to create each of the blades of grass individually," Holder says.

Holder says the pieces go through a low-temperature firing, and then they're dipped in glaze and fired again. She mixes all of her own glazes, experimenting with different glaze recipes and colorants.

"To get that green glaze, I tested probably at least 50 different glaze colors," she says. "I wanted it to be really bright and lush and almost kind of glittering, so it would look really appealing."

The color varies a bit depending on factors such as how quickly the kiln cools or how thick the glaze is on the piece.

"You get some natural variation in the glaze, which I like. I think if it was all exactly the same, it would look a little boring."

"It's an absolutely stunning piece and very fragile, obviously," Ortega says.

Holder says she can change the layout of the work depending on where it is installed. She often creates repeated pieces that she can use to work together in a large space, and she likes for her work to confront the viewers on a large scale and allow them to imagine themselves inside the art, she says. She primarily uses porcelain for her medium because it is very white and fragile, adding that she uses this as a metaphor in her work for how easily the balance can be disrupted in a a space and environment. Holder has also incorporated fabric, wood, chocolate and candy in her work.

Holder decided to enter this work into the invitational because "a lot of people really connect to their yard and to their lawn through nostalgia and through the sense of memory of childhood."

"I think how you set up your yard and your lawn says a lot about who you are and what you value," she adds.

This is Holder's third year in Arkansas, where she works as an assistant professor of art at University of the Ozarks. She says she has always balanced working in the art field, teaching and making her own art. She received a bachelor of fine arts in ceramics with a minor in Latin from the University of Georgia and a master of fine arts in ceramics from Rhode Island School of Design.

Holder already has some ideas for her solo show next year, but she says she needs to do some experiments to see if these ideas will work.

"It is my goal to create a completely new installation for the show."

Winners were announced during the opening reception. Holder received $1,000 and a solo show in 2015 at the museum. Jeanne Vockroth took second prize, winning $500, and the $300 third prize went to Sabine Schmidt. The People's Choice Award will be announced on Facebook near the end of the exhibition, and viewers can vote once per visit to the exhibition. Jurors for the show were Dayton Castleman, museum manager at 21c Museum Hotel in Bentonville; Manuela Well-Off-Man, assistant curator at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville; and Kristen Ann Musgnug, associate professor of painting at the University of Arkansas. Ortega says some of the judging criteria included technical excellence, excellence in communicating the subject matter and the theme.