Madison Originals Magazine Madison Originals Magazine May 2014 | Page 23

possibility of working in the library.
“Trent had been talking about wanting
to do this program for awhile,” Barbara
remembers. “It was one of those things of
being in the right place at the right time:
being in the heart of Madison; meeting
all kinds of people; I didn’t have a studio.
It was really a good opportunity.”
As the program’s very first AIR, Barbara
helped set the tone for both collaboration
and freedom with regard to the structure
of the residency. Together with Trent,
Barbara wanted to make sure the
experience worked well for both her and
the library. “[Trent] was very open to
trying different things, and it was a workin-progress. I have a feeling everyone
will bring their own thing to it.”
The program was an immediate hit.
“Opening day was really intense,” says
Barbara. “My husband actually came and
we literally did papermaking and pulpmaking with people for five hours straight,
not even looking up. We just had this
stream of people coming in. Afterwards
we had so many of these pulp paintings,
I thought it would be interesting to make
something bigger from them. So I used
cardboard to put together a Community
Shingle Wall. It was kind of fun to make
this bigger project out of the public
working with me.”

people and in the public eye all the time.
I thought, ‘How can I take advantage of
this and have the public help me?’ One
project was the Crumplers. I would have
people leave me notes—it could be your
to-do list, your grocery list, you could
leave a quote or a sketch. Then I’d make
pictures like the lines of your note, match
the handwriting or the sketch. That in
itself was really fun—it makes you look
a lot closer at what people create. Then I
crumpled them up and left them around
the library. We had to tell the cleaning
staff, no, this is not garbage. It was fun.”

thinking differently, thinking how can I
get the community involved, have the
community helping me make my work.
That was a nice challenge.”

Barbara is currently teaching an
introductory papermaking class at
UW-Madison. She “did finally find a
studio,” and finds “it’s good to be back
making art again. I’m working very
differently not having the community
around me, but I’d like to carry some
of that thinking that I learned at the
Bubbler into my future work. I learned a
different way of working. I definitely was

You could say that Victor Castro traveled
light when he left his native Mexico to
pursue a career as an artist. “I carried
with me a knife and pliers and all my
conception of art,” he remembers. It was
in Spain, and later in Peru, that Victor
developed an interest in using everyday
objects as art materials. As a student, he
began working with food cans leftover

As Barbara learned, the public setting
brought both challenges and rewards.
“I was used to working shut up, alone,
and now here I was, interacting with

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