Patrick Costello - AND EAT IT TOO
Patrick Costello has made visible the interconnected process of art-making by gathering fellow artists, volunteers, farmers, carpenters, and friends to join in constructing the sculptural work AND EAT IT TOO. A monumental, composting structure of plants, hay, wood chips, and elephant dung, AND EAT IT TOO finds joy in our being part of the ecosystem, explores the many relationships we have to land, and invites the notion that we are creatures of joy, pleasure, and decay.
Patrick is a recipient of a 2023 NYSCA Individual Artist Grant. This project is additionally funded by the Puffin Foundation and Foundation for Contemporary Art.
Planning sketch for Costello's installation on the grounds.
Work-in-progress images of AND EAT IT TOO. Hay bales, indigo-dyed silt socks filled with elephant dung, straw, and wood chips, and regional plants.
Patrick filling silt socks with Nick Borsellino operating the skid steer and silt sock filler.
Artists Ro, Mitchell, and Taryn installing the silt socks.
A slide from Patrick's August 20, 2023 artist talk held in Stone Quarry's Art Barn. A quote from Jill Dolan's Utopia in Performance.
Saturday, August 26th: A Pancake Breakfast made in collaboration with Ben Simon to welcome AND EAT IT TOO to the grounds. Many of the pancake toppings and ingredients were locally sourced and donated.
AND EAT IT TOO completed, but ever-changing! The piece will bloom, decay, bloom again, sink, and compost.
About the artist:
Patrick Costello is an artist and performer who works across creative disciplines and genres, contending with themes of history, ecology, horticulture, collaboration, and queer joy. Informed by the process of composting, Patrick's work experiments with temporary world-building as a way of accessing the potential for collective transformation and utopian possibility.
Patrick completed an MFA in Combined Media at Hunter College in 2018 and earned a BA in Printmaking from the University of Virginia in 2008. Patrick's work has been exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, 601 Artspace (NYC), Second Street Gallery (Charlottesville), and Socrates Sculpture Park (Queens), as well as independent and alternative spaces nationally and abroad including Cinema Balash (NYC), Space 1026 (Philadelphia), and Trance Pop (Tokyo), with performances in venues including Ars Nova (NYC), the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center (Waterford), the Philadelphia Museum of Art (Philadelphia), Space Gallery (Portland), Ohranimo Tovarno Rog (Ljubljana), and a sheep farm in Waikawa, New Zealand. Patrick has held residencies with Shandaken Projects (NYC), The Soil Factory (Ithaca), ACRE (Chicago), New City Arts (Charlottesville), and HewnOaks Artist Colony (Lovell). Patrick lives and works between New York City and Gayfeather Gardens, an off-grid land project located in the Hudson Valley. https://www.patrickjcostello.n...