Marjorie Woodruff

The second, SPIRAL:The Life of Lucy E. Parsons in Chicago, 1873-1942, was installed on Chicago Park District property in Wicker Park from 1995-2004.The piece was composed of a spiraling bench and a “mailbox” both made of wood, metal mesh, and ceramic tiles with text in Spanish, Polish, and English that told the story of Lucy Ella Gonzalez Parsons, a labor and civil rights activist who lived in the neighborhood. My work has also focused on smaller-scale hand-built and thrown ceramic objects that combine functional and sculptural forms addressing social and political issues. In 2009, these sculptures were exhibited in a solo show at Woman Made Gallery called Rack and Ruin. In recent years, I've also exhibited at Governors State University, Bridgeport Art Center,ARC Gallery, Noyes Cultural Arts Center,The Wormfarm Institute's Woolen Mill Gallery (Reedsburg,WI), and the Catholic Theological Union. The first of my Ghost Trees series, which connect old- growth forests with domestic woodwork, consisted of a room-sized installation that was part of a group exhibition at the Illinois State Museum Gallery called FootprintsThroughTime:Artists Inspired by History in spring 2015; it reflected on the loss and transformation of primeval forests in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula (a source of lumber used to build many of Chicago’s homes at the turn of the century).This series continued with a 2-year intervention marking what’s believed to be the most remote site in Cook County, in Cap Sauer’s Holdings of the Cook County Forest Preserves, 2015-17. In the summer of 2018, I completed Ghost Trees III nature-art installation in Oranki Environmental Art Park, near Pello, Lapland, Finland, bringing the series full circle back to the ancestral home of Finnish immigrant loggers. Small works of the Lapland Tree Series were exhibited at Prairie State College, SPACE 900, and Woman Made Gallery in 2018 and 2019.