PORT ANGELES — Sometimes, when people walk into a Margie McDonald art show, they burst out laughing.
“I love that response,” says the ebullient sculptor, who’s just finished setting up a truckload of her creations at the Port Angeles Fine Arts Center. She’ll give a presentation about the new show at 4 p.m. Saturday at the center, 1203 E. Lauridsen Blvd., and then stay for the opening reception from 4:30 p.m. to 5 p.m. The exhibition, as yet untitled, will inhabit the center through Aug. 28.
Admission is free to the fine arts center’s indoor gallery, which is open from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Thursdays through Sundays. The surrounding 5-acre art park called Webster’s Woods, meanwhile, is open daily from dawn till dusk.
McDonald, who lives in Port Townsend, built her show to look like “an underwater science fiction scene,” with stainless-steel fish, seaweed and at least two dozen starfish.
“This is my primordial soup series,” she said, “and the first time I’ve made this many small sculptures.
“I’ve never done this before, and I had a very short window,” added McDonald, who talks fast while arranging the fibers of a kelplike creature. It was little more than three weeks ago that Port Angeles Fine Arts Center director Robin Anderson phoned McDonald to ask her if she could mount a show, and quick.
Port Angeles sculptor Clark Mundy had been slated to have the next exhibition, titled “Between Worlds,” but health problems necessitated postponement.
“I’ve been in my studio from 8 in the morning until 11 at night,” McDonald said earlier this week.
“I love having that pressure of a deadline, she added. “It makes me very productive.”
The artist has produced 40 new pieces of 8 to 10 inches in height plus 15 more sculptures for the window side of the fine arts center.
Yes, they’re “crazy” and “weird,” in the artist’s words. She doesn’t want anybody taking it seriously.
“It’s fun work,” McDonald said, and it’s OK to touch it. Just be careful of the sharp edges and pointy parts.
A native of Newfoundland, McDonald moved to Port Townsend in 1998 and started rigging boats. A fiber artist, she was then inspired by wire, and has been using recycled materials ever since.
Earlier this year she made a dress, titled “Belabor the Point,” of vapor-barrier plastic. Held together with a multitude of staples, it appeared in the Port Townsend Wearable Art Show in May.
“Recycling is the basis of my current work,” she said, “because of my desire to reuse the huge variety of interesting objects” out there. “Every material has a unique nature that can be drawn out and given a new life.
“I want to engage the unconventional art viewer.”
