Cloud Coverage

Mei-Ling Hom's wire mesh sculptures are symbols of good fortune.

by Roberta Fallon

Not only is the artist and Pew fellow installing at the Sackler, but she just won a design competition for the campus walkway at Fleisher Art Memorial. In October her "Chinatown Eyes" will debut as part of the Asian Arts Initiative's PEI-funded "Chinatown Influx" project. (Hom's the only local artist included in that effort.)

And the morning we visited she'd just shipped some large sculptures (her "Silkworm" pieces made in conjunction with the Fabric Workshop and Museum) to Tufts University Museum for a show. All this is in addition to teaching at Community College of Philadelphia.

Hom is a gentle, generous soul. Our visit, which I thought would last an hour, stretched to more than two and a half, fueled by green tea and a bubbly, wide-ranging conversation about art, studio life, South Philadelphia and China. Hom's husband David McClelland-himself an artist, writer, carpenter and Hom's assistant on her installations-was an active participant in our discussion. The couple seem to be completely in sync.

Seeing work in an artist's studio requires imagination. Studios are happy places but usually cluttered with tools and raw materials. In Hom's cavernous, high-ceilinged studio, the new work-35 wire mesh clouds, hanging from the ceiling, sitting on boxes and curled up in the corner-was almost invisible.

Hom's clouds are made from standard-issue chicken wire that the artist bends into shapes and closes at the ends the way you would if you were making a pillow or a stuffed animal. She doesn't start with a pattern but goes straight to the chicken wire for inspiration. Hom uses the scratchy wire mesh itself to close the seams, twisting and knotting it with needle-nose pliers. Sometimes she makes a dart this way too. (She covers her fingertips with electrical tape to protect them.)

Like real clouds, the metaphorical clouds are dreamy and evocative, but take up real space. It'll take four trucks to get the almost three dozen clouds down to Washington, she says. The pieces will be on exhibit at Sackler for six months. "Free storage!" Hom says. Actually there are six more clouds waiting to be installed at Philadelphia International Airport, she adds, which is even more free public-sector storage.

The airport clouds burst on the scene last year in a show at Fleisher-Ollman Gallery, for which Hom commissioned Curtis grad Eli Marshall to compose a musical accompaniment. She commissioned Marshall again for the Sackler piece. The recorded music, played on a bamboo flute by a Chinese musician, will create a soundscape that ebbs and flows as you stroll beneath the clouds suspended at different levels and coming together in what Hom calls "a critical mass" at one end.

Hom met Marshall through Community College. "His grandmother was my student, and she said, 'You should collaborate with my grandson.'" Marshall, now living and working in Beijing after completing a Fulbright residency there, will help install his new piece in Washington, D.C.

These are tight budget days for the Sackler, which has no money for a reception. And Hom had to pay for the brochure out of her artist's fee. But Smithsonian Magazine is doing a story about her.

Hom started making clouds in 2001. "The cloud is a symbol of fortune," she explains. "Repeated cloud forms means never-ending fortune." Her first efforts were carvings of laminated wood blocks using a hatchet. That's bringing on the big guns to make something so ephemeral. But the small wood clouds I saw in the studio strongly resemble their wire mesh second cousins twice removed.

"Chinatown Eyes," Hom's outdoor project for the Asian Arts Initiative, was planned for the side of a building, but because the building's going to be demolished, it'll be on the cyclone fencing on Vine Street. The artist, ever flexible, retrofitted her idea to accommodate the new space.

Working with digital photographer Richard Ryan, Hom is photographing the eyes of Chinatown community members. She'll enlarge the photos and place the eyes, mural-like, on the fence facing both the passers-by on the expressway and the residents of Chinatown. That project will have its official opening in late October.

Hom's eyes will be upon you this fall and her lyrical clouds will be just about everywhere. Don't miss a chance to see them.

"Perspectives: Mei-ling Hom"
Sat., Aug. 27. Through March 5. Sackler Gallery, 1050 Independence Ave., SW, Washington, D.C. 202.357.2700. www.asia.si.edu/exhibitions/future.htm