Visiting Artist Series: Pamela Moulton
Photographic portrait of Pamela Mouton, the first artist in the Visiting Artist Series at the Children’s Museum & Theatre of Maine. Photo: Bonnie Durham.
The Visiting Artist Series in the Lunder Arts and Culture Gallery is designed to enrich the Museum & Theatre’s arts education programming for children and their families with a focus on using art as a lens to explore sustainability and our changing planet. From February 19, 2022 to May 28, 2022, the Visiting Artist Series will host three artists who call Maine home. The Artists will work with Museum & Theatre visitors to create communal works of art.
As the first in the Visiting Artist Series at the Children’s Museum & Theatre of Maine, Pamela Moulton will facilitate two projects. The first is an immersive sculptural installation that visitors will create using projects that use repurposed fishing rope and nets. The rope and nets are sourced through cleanup efforts done by the Gulf of Maine Lobster Foundation. The second project invites visitors to repurpose found objects to create an enchanting underwater forest environment.
Pamela Moulton’s installations are large-scale, playful, hands-on, exploratory and mysterious. Moulton is a multi-disciplinary-environmental artist whose newest human-scale immersive environments are built entirely from salvaged commercial nets and ropes. Her interactive spaces may be crawled through, climbed upon and occupied, allowing the public to explore its environmental consciousness in a direct, material way. Moulton uses these local materials to pull her visitors into spaces which are evocative, sensory, and contemplative. She invites visitors to play artist’s games that spur their conscientiousness. A community artist, world-building and collaboration are the building blocks of Moulton’s practice where she collaborates with schools and organizations to create elements for her installations. Her work is created from recycled materials, often marine debris; a choice based in environmental consciousness. The accessibility and joyousness of this work lends itself to teaching-moments about the fragility of our ecosystem and the openness to consider better futures worth imagining. She hopes her art can act as an elixir that transports you to a child-like state of mind, awakening your curiosity and senses.
Pamela Moulton Bio:
Born in 1961 in Pennsylvania, Pamela Moulton is a Franco-American artist, presently living and working in Maine. Pamela received her Bachelor of Studio Art from the University of Vermont and Villa Arson in Nice, France in 1984. She moved between New York City, Spain, and Italy, working as a set designer and art director, while always privileging her art. Motherhood brought to France where she lived for 25 years, earning her Master of Fine Arts from the Ecole Supérieure d’Art d’ Aix en Provence, in 2011. She studied dance pedagogy at the IUFM in Blois, France for 7 years which was a catalyst for her work as a community artist where she was engaged to bring contemporary dance into rural France. Prolific collaborator, as both teacher and artist, Pamela tries to foster an ethos of generosity and creative exchange through her public engagement work and has been making art and collaborating with multigenerational communities for over 30 years in faraway places like Albania and India. Pamela’s professional experiences range from designing a traveling multisensory museum, collaborations with a blind children’s center, creating for toy companies, children’s films, and her love of teaching students from 2 to 106 years old. Sharing art making and opening doors to address climate change are the common threads for all these experiences. Moulton has installed large, public-facing installations in the United States and abroad, including work for Laudholm Reserve, Circus Acrobats, Bigelow Laboratory and Percent for Art projects. Her most recent project is an immersive piece commissioned by Arcadia Earth Experiential Museum in Las Vegas. Summers, Pamela is privileged to work as Resident manager of the Hewnoaks Artist Colony where she cultivates friendships with artists, her community, and works on her art.
One of Pamela’s upcoming projects is Every Tree Tells a Story, an immersive installation that is the winner of the 2022 TEMPOarts grant. Once completed the installation is planned for Payson Park in Portland. Visitors at the Museum & Theatre will contribute to the sculpture by using “ghost gear” or reclaimed fishing nets and bait bags to help make elements of the colorful sculpture.
In addition to creating elements for Every Tree Tells a Story, visitors will also get to create elements for an underwater FOREST. The design and first iteration of the FOREST was previously funded by the Maine Arts Commission.
Schedule for Pamela Moulton at the Children’s Museum & Theatre of Maine’s Makerspace
Visiting Artist Series: Pamela Moulton
Feb 26, 2022
9:15 AM – 10:15 AM
Visiting Artist Series: Pamela Moulton
Feb 26, 2022
10:45 AM – 11:45 AM
Visiting Artist Series: Pamela Moulton
Mar 12, 2022
9:15 AM – 10:15 AM
Visiting Artist Series: Pamela Moulton
Mar 12, 2022
10:45 AM – 11:45 AM
Visiting Artist Series: Pamela Moulton
Mar 19, 2022
9:15 AM – 10:15 AM
Visiting Artist Series: Pamela Moulton
Mar 19, 2022
10:45 AM – 11:45 AM
More About the Visiting Artist Series
Beginning in February and continuing through May, visitors will have the opportunity to meet and create alongside our three Visiting Artists who were chosen through a rigorous application and selection process: Pamela Moulton, Roberta March and Marissa Glover. Over the course of several dates, each Visiting Artist will be working in the Makerspace for special “pop-up studios” during specific play sessions over four weeks (please see events calendar).
Each artist works in a different medium and will supply base materials and lead special art-making techniques that visitors will use to contribute to the communal work of art. Over the course of the spring, visitors will help create sustainability-themed artwork:
The Museum & Theatre’s mission promotes engagement with the transformative power of the arts and provides essential opportunities for children to explore identity, foster creativity, and develop critical life skills essential for healthy development. As children engage in artmaking, they also are given the opportunity to explore new and complex ideas and express their understanding of the world around them.
In addition to generous funding of the Lunder Arts & Culture Gallery by The Lunder Foundation,
the Visiting Artist Series is funded by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.