Mei-ling Hom
Tea Drop -1
Tea Drop -2
Large leaf tea plants, spelt straw, hex netting, wood, jute, twine, soil, peat moss
Artist Statement
Untethered and isolated during this pandemic, I strove to maintain my sculpting on the farm where I spend my summers in the Allegheny Highlands of western New York. Distant from a cohort of human collaborators, I collaborate with fungi, bacteria, archaea, and green plants. Meeting the other artists and participating in onsite and virtual Zoom meetings revealed a multigenerational, multicultural art making process. The ongoing dialogue between the organizers and the artists uncovered the complexity of creating this exhibition but my own experience has been patiently manipulating wire, and seeking out Amish farms for hand-harvested, long-stemmed straw, which was finally sourced from the Enos Miller homestead. The biggest challenge in collaborating with the microbial world of the soil and living growing plant life is survival. I am hoping the tea plants, Camelia sinensis, will put forth a robust response to their new setting and will find the interaction with bacteria and fungi stimulating to their growth. Hopefully they will be adopted into permanent Philadelphia landscapes. This diversity in our grown environment is a perfect metaphor for our social landscapes. I envision a future respectful of diverse cultures, caring of our fragile environment, and committed to creating sustainable, resilient lifestyles whether it is making art or growing food to enhance our lives in culturally rich, healthy, and sustainable ways.
About the Artist
Mei-ling Hom was born in New Haven, Connecticut. She received her BA degree from Kirkland College, and then moved to Philadelphia to pursue an exhibition career and a teaching career at the Community College of Philadelphia. She received an MFA in Sculpture from Alfred University in New York. During those graduate school years she became co-owner of a farm, which gradually turned her art making practice into an integrated collaboration of art and farming.
While designing and installing permanent public art installations at the Raleigh Durham International Airport, the Philadelphia International Airport, the Live Hotel in Baltimore, and the Pennsylvania Convention Center in Philadelphia, Mei-ling also had major temporary site installation exhibitions at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles, The Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, and the Sackler Gallery of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC. Among her fellowship awards are: the Pew Fellowships for Visual Arts, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, three Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Awards, the Leeway Foundation, the Independence Foundation, a Fulbright Research Fellowship to Korea, and a Joan Mitchell Foundation Fellowship. Artist residencies have influenced her career through exposure to other cultures, and collaborations with artists, writers, horticulturalists, and farming communities. Besides numerous locations in the U.S., artist residencies have taken her to Australia, Thailand, Japan, Korea, China, France, Italy, Germany, and Spain. Her most recent residencies have been art and environmental awards at the Bernheim Arboretum and Research Forest in Kentucky, the McColl Center for Art + Innovation in North Carolina, the Women’s Studio Workshop in New York, and the Bilpin International Grounds for Creative Initiatives in Australia. Currently she is a member of Art2Grow, an eco-art collaborative dedicated to restoring degraded habitat using biodegradable sculptures and mycorrhizal fungi. Hom currently divides her working year between her studio in Philadelphia and her studio/farm in Andover, New York.