Ann Savageau, submitted artwork
Ann Savageau
Sculpture
Davis, California
Ann Savageau is an artist, academic and activist who creates mixed-media sculpture and installations. Her early immersion in the Islamic art and architecture of Iran, her undergraduate study of anthropology and the creative work of indigenous cultures around the world have had a profound influence on her aesthetic. Her childhood on a farm near the Rocky Mountains fostered her great love of nature and her preference for fashioning her work from natural and castoff materials. The losses of her three young adult children prompted her to spend four years creating two large installations in their memory and honor (“Life/Line” 2001; “Guardians: Spirits of Protection” 2018-2021). Ann has a deep and abiding love for our planet and has created large multi-year environment-themed installations, including “At the Crossroads” (2007), “Bags Across the Globe” (2008-2013); and “Instinct/Extinct: The Great Pacific Flyway” (2014-2018, with Valerie Constantino and Glenda Drew). Ann had a long academic career at the University of Michigan Residential College and at University of California Davis. Her activism included teaching a weekly art workshop at Jackson Prison in Michigan. She devotes herself to her studio practice and is working on an installation to raise awareness about the mass die-off of the world’s forests due to climate change.
Works
Ann Savageau, submitted artwork
I am a mixed-media artist, activist, educator, and writer, exploring the creative possibilities of a broad range of natural and man-made materials. I consider myself a “post-disciplinary” artist, basing my work on concepts rather than traditional mediums. Throughout my career, I have focused on materials and techniques that best convey the concepts I address. My work has long explored the intersection of culture and the environment. It challenges our conceptions of the useful and useless, the beautiful and ugly. In this intersection of nature and culture, I find the most interesting issues, processes and statements. I collect natural materials and manmade detritus routinely discarded as worthless, combining and transforming them into new entities that bear the marks of their origins, history and alteration. The inherent worthiness of all matter and rejection of a hierarchy of values, and the urgent need to take the necessary steps to preserve our ecosystem, underlie my work.
