Sewaneetian  -  \swä-ˈnē-shәn\ 

-noun 

1) native, inhabitant, visiting or permanent student, tuition-paying-responsible-party, professor, theolog, priest, P.K., Assembly Person or family living in, around or on the verge of Sewanee or in imitation of a style typical or indicative of Sewaneetians.  

2) one who has, purposefully or otherwise, stumbled in, through, along, into and throughout Sewanee, breathed the air, climbed, crawled, run, hiked or mountain biked the Perimeter, tapped an angel, shopped at ‘the Pig’, drunk an icy beverage with a local artist, got jiggy with the string section in the July 4th parade, entered a dog in the mutt show, and/or basked in the smells, bells and splendorocity of Lessons and Carols.  

3) You’ve lived through the grey winter.  You’ve driven in the ubiquitous fog. The cute deer eating your garden enrage you. The Post Office excites you.  You’re counting the days til Pearl’s re-opens. 

You know who you are.  You’re a Sewaneetian.  You’re a Local. 

Sewanee is experienced best...simply...in the delight of the July 4th Parade down University Avenue and incense and chapel bells at Lessons and Carols in December. Music, art and family gatherings on campus and at the Assembly bring travelers home year after year. Kids on bikes in the summer.  Walking on campus at dusk. Foggy days. Camps and retreats.  The simplicity of Sewanee draws and nurtures unlikely bohemians, creators and free thinkers...all connected by art, music, history and community. Weary travelers come back home to Sewanee.

Locals once housed a grocery, a dry cleaner and a bank until the interior was renovated by local craftsmen in wood, stone and brick in the style of Arts and Crafts.  Now a living part of the village of Sewanee, Locals is a place where life around the mountain is reflected in art.  

This fall, Locals welcomes Mary L. Lynch, bringing hand built, utilitarian pots from her studio in Georgetown, Tennessee. Mary builds forms in stages, similar to the growth of plants, using leaves, shells, found objects, and other materials to layer the textures and impressions on clay slabs, then she cuts and forms the slabs into the desired shapes, making stunning, utilitarian forms that reflect her admiration and respect for the natural world. 

Leaves are gathered from the mountain and Lost Cove and naturally etched into copper by G. Sanford McGee.  Sanford is a local with longstanding interest and education in chemistry and biology and a lifelong curiosity about how we fit together with nature. Sanford's focus is in creating artful architecture in the most macrobiotic manner available.

Tom Church works primarily with regional hardwoods like cherry, poplar, maple and oak, hand turning bowls and finding breathtaking designs, otherwise hidden from site in rare woods, on his hand-built lathe. Tom's holly and box elder urns and bowls look and feel like porcelain.  Special woods, burls and unique wormwoods, become tables and hand-designed cabinets. Tom, Sanford and Jamey have collaborated on several pieces of furniture, integrating copper and forged steel with wood. 

Susan Church, Tom’s wife uses so-called ‘scraps’ from his wood pile to create clever, rare hand-tooled boxes with whimsical bronze castings of animals and playful characters specially made with Susan's beautifully made boxes in mind by her friend Jeanie Stephenson. Susan masterfully finds wood with natural holes and purposefully perches Jeanie’s bronze bunny to peer down the rabbit hole.  There are cats falling off the natural edge of a box top or elephants and porpoises swimming through the wood, with the wood grain circles serving as a wake in the water. 

Jeanie Stephenson, who has collaborated for years with Susan Church to create bronze characters topping Church’s boxes, also offers her larger bronze works at Locals.  Jeanie uses the ancient “lost wax” method to produce sculptures, influenced by observations as a former Biologist, traveler and from memory and imagination.

A welder by trade and artist by nature, Jamey "Otis" Chernicky forges and hammers iron, steel and sheet metal with great imagination, creating a wide range of artwork varying in size from large sculpted angels to a massive owl sitting on a branch, all done in forged metal and sometimes finished in bronze. Jamey uses scrap metals from leftover sprinkler system installations, rebar steel and salvaged car hoods, bumpers and doors to form larger than life tortoise shells hanging in lofts and perched in gardens all over the country.  He recently used the door panels and bumpers of a rusted out 74 Maverick and an old Dodge, heating, hammering and forming tulip candle holders and yard art to include the natural reds, yellows and white's of the worn out vehicle from which they came.

Jimmy Abegg paints magnificent characters, faces, landscapes and abstracts on every texture imaginable, including foreign magazine pages and old pencil scratch architectural studies, paper on burlap coffee bags on wood, hand-stretched linen and canvas.  His landscapes of the valley and views from the cross, off the mountain, are stunning and rich and hanging on the walls of Locals this season.  The faces of his saints are memorable and often haunting and the textures he chooses are fascinating.

Clay Binkley crafts beauty from ashes…literally.  Clay has rescued burned out tin roofs and barn wood to create elegantly textured tin-roof topped tables and classic, rolled picture frames.  He finds art and function, combining salvaged materials like a Caterpillar skidder he and his wife found half-buried in the woods of their local property, ‘See Ruby Falls’ painted tin roof that he bought from a farmer years ago, used up guitar strings and yanked out floor joists and beams, to make sculpted mirrors, frames and functional architectural pieces.  And, Clay tells the story, eloquently, on the back of every piece of his work.

Thomas Spake’s work with glass as a sculptural material, is an intensely fragile and physical art form.  His glassblowing ranges in scale from small glass ornaments and paperweights to beautiful, thin, flutter vases, vessels, urns and outdoor glass sculpture.  Thomas grew up in a small town in Georgia, studied at Centre College in Kentucky, and recently transplanted his studio just down the mountain in Jasper, Tennessee.

Kit Reuther lives one degree of separation from Sewanee.  When Kit was young, she would fly ‘up’ to Sewanee with her father in his Cesna to pick up and deliver Red Cross supplies to the local hospital.  While she waited on her dad, she spent hours and hours sketching All Saints Chapel. Today, Kit’s paintings hang in gallery walls all over the world in national buildings, collections and solo exhibits hosted by notable galleries coast to coast.  

‘Raydarr’ (W.C. Craig) spends as much time as possible with friends “out Jumpoff”…so much time, in fact, that he calls his hand embellished walking sticks and staffs “Jumpoff Sticks”.  Most of Raydarr’s sticks start as found or cut saplings or limbs that have fallen or those he prunes from overgrown yards and vacant lots.  He has a knack for finding really interesting woods – Crabapple, Swamp Cypress, Black Locust…Red Mulberry and Magnolia – and by the time he’s done with them, they’re as soft as satin and tattooed with his cool designs, lines, squiggles and hieroglyphics.

For more information:

Melissa Goodson
 - Locals at Sewanee

49 University Avenue
  Sewanee, Tennessee 

localsgallery@att.net     931.598.0400

www.localsatsewanee.com

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