Third Street Gallery archive: 2008 Exhibitions: At Bay: An Installation by Lori Goodman

This essay was prepared by HSU students: Ryan Cox, Stepanie Guel,
Jill Moore, Jon McCallum, Adam Poore, Charissa Schulze and Brian Tyzzer.

Lori Goodman’s installation, At Bay, is based on her observations made during numerous hikes through the Eureka Wildlife Sanctuary, whose beauty and ecological complexity she believes is locally underappreciated. Her desire with this exhibition is to draw attention to the sanctuary while making a cohesive gallery installation. Goodman’s approach is to extract and then amplify visual elements from the sanctuary, interpreting the site through a sculptural installation that employs many sizes, shapes, and colors of handmade papers.

Through the repetition and alteration of organic forms, artist Lori Goodman invites us to reflect upon and appreciate our world. Goodman looks intimately at life; absorbing the minute details through a process of dissecting and exaggerating her observations, she presents nature’s often overlooked beauty in the gallery space where it can be seen in a new light. Goodman hopes her work will elicit personal contemplation and scrutiny from her audience, stirring us towards environmental and self-awareness in a compelling yet unpretentious manner. In a world seemingly saturated by industrial destruction, Goodman is conscious of how easily we can become complacent and ignorant regarding nature. We may notice the spectacular aspects, the brightest flower or the oldest tree, yet we increasingly fail to appreciate the less fantastic: the reeds, the sands, the grasses, and the marshlands of the Earth. However, by emphasizing the relationships between humans and our effect on the environment and by contrasting organic forms with inorganic shapes and colors, Goodman awakens us to a realm that has always been there for us - the forgotten natural world.

Lori Goodman was born in Montana and grew up in Los Angeles, California. She started taking art classes in college and received her Bachelor of Arts degree from Los Angeles State University in 1966. While still in college, Goodman moved with her husband to Philadelphia, and in 1973 they moved to Humboldt County, California to raise their family. Later, in 1990, she earned a Master of Arts degree in Sculpture from Humboldt State University. Goodman’s original love of weaving opened the doors to paper-making and the fiber arts in which she has been involved for over a quarter century. In that time she has owned and operated a fiber arts store, taught a variety of textile and fiber arts classes at various universities, and displayed her work professionally in New York, Oregon, Switzerland, Belize, West Africa, and throughout California.