Wandering: 2007

Wood, Stone, Bone

Mindport exhibits: bellingham, washington
Lara Gaasland-Tatro grew up in a home among the trees, just a stone’s throw from a rocky beach on Puget Sound’s Budd Inlet outside of Olympia, Washington. Lara’s mother, Linda Lee Tatro, a fifth grade teacher with a passion for science in the natural world, taught her early to hike for miles without losing endurance, how to look for forest secrets and which trailside plants are edible. Linda Lee’s early lessons inspired in Lara a lifetime of travel, art and scientific research. Lara has caught and released mongeese in Africa where she also emerged, limbs intact, from a very close encounter with a lion pride and worked scorpion patrol at the request of her more timid fellow researchers. She has spent time on land and in water for biological investigations in Belize and educated large audiences of hikers at Mt. St. Helen’s. The flora and fauna she experienced in these and all of her travels compels her to make art of many mediums; acrylic paintings, ceramic vases, metalsmithing, biological illustration, photography, carving, jewelry, and pencil drawings. Tiny aluminum-copper dragonflies and pairs of human-scale butterfly wings have also been born from her imagination.
Lara has even dared to exlore the flatness of the Midwest. While attaining a B.A. in Biology and a new appreciation for stress-management at Grinnell College in Iowa, she also fell in love with Anthropology and learned the ancient art of flintknapping and atlatl throwing. Despite all the intellectual brain candy in the Midwest, Lara missed the trees of Washington. She spent one summer break from Grinnell learning camper diplomacy and maintaining trails as a volunteer ranger on the Wilderness Beach of Lake Ozette on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula. She was mostly alone with the bears, trees, and her own manual labor---and did it for free. After leaving Grinnell College, Lara earned an M.Ed. in Environmental Education from Western Washington University. She also served as a professional Park Ranger at Mt. St. Helen’s. Not satisfied with teaching atop mountains, she later decided to do it on water. She joined the crew of the Adventuress, a one hundred-thiryseven-foot schooner/classroom for the Sound Experience program, where she not only hauled sails until she had to glue the cracks in her hands together, but also entertained kids ages 4-40 while teaching them ocean biology and teamwork.
Lara is a big kid herself. Once, in an effort to help a friend who wanted to lighten up the hideous black muumuu that we call “graduation gowns”, Lara stopped mid-conversation and climbed into an eight-foot high construction dumpster on the Grinnell College campus. After disappearing for several minutes, to the puzzlement of her company, she emerged holding a ten-foot length of what looked like a rubber tube and a pipe. To everyone’s surprise, after she stripped off the rubber, added fabric, paint, and elbow grease, there emerged a beautiful pair of copper-wire butterfly wings reminiscent of the Blue Morpho. The pipe was then subjected to Lara’s hammering and tinkering, and soon became a working copper fountain in the shape of a Cala lily. This is more evidence that for Lara, biology and art are inextricably connected. So it is fitting that this, her first formal art show, display art that comes forth from some of the most essential elements of our world; Wood, Stone, Bone. There is not a more perfect title for a display of Lara’s art for these are the things that have occupied her mind and hands for years. She takes in the world around her and infuses its beauty and her vision into the objects she holds. Viewers will see here not just her art, but her mind, in pieces of the world around us.
Bridget Barni
December 2007
Seattle, Washington