When sculptor Carolyn Ottmers moved here from Austin, Texas, in 1986 to attend grad school at the School of the Art Institute, she was initially impressed by the lake, the architecture, and the industry–particularly the many light manufacturing businesses, a potential resource for sculptors. But by late autumn the skies were gray and her surroundings slushy. She began to miss the gardening and hiking she’d done back home and started looking for “signs of life” in Chicago. What she found were weeds. “Chicago’s density had a pretty big effect on me,” she says. She began making “these little plant sculptures on the side as a way of surrounding myself with nature in my studio. I made a flower corolla out of layers and layers of newsprint.” Soon she decided she wanted to focus on plants, and by the end of grad school she’d made 500 leaves from beer and wine bottles gathered from a vacant lot, crushing them and then partially melting and molding the fragments into leaf form. These works expressed both her love of nature and her love of the city.
