WAAC Culture Corner: Eggshells for April
Prepared by WAAC Member and Westport Poet Laureate Diane Lowman Welcome back to the Westport Local Press’s Westport Arts Advisory Committee’s “Culture Corner.” Each month, the WAAC will scour our 33.45 square miles and highlight one of the many artists – visual, written, performance, and other – who call Westport home. These artists create a spectrum of color that shines over town like the rainbows often seen over the Saugatuck, so we have made “color” our theme. Our profiles will feature art that, however tightly or tenuously, connects to a color.
For April, that color is eggshell white, not because of its ubiquity in home decorators’ palettes, but because it nods to the ovate object that figures prominently in two of the month’s celebrations as well as in our featured artist’s work. The egg (and please be prepared for proliferating puns), symbolic of rebirth and new life, shows up on lawns and in baskets at Easter, and on Seder plates at Passover, and by the thousands in this artisan’s home.
Linn Cassetta (http://www.linncassettadesign.com/), whose egg creations can be seen in the storefront 24/7 gallery at 47 Main Street until April 5, majored in apparel both as an undergrad at RISD, and for her MA at London’s Royal College of Art. The first American to graduate from the latter, Cassetta also studied apparel design there. Her designs garnered the attention of Vogue editors and shoe designers alike, and following a stint at Andrew Geller Shoes, she developed her eponymous – Linn Callahan -apparel label.
After a career move to a Japanese fabric manufacturer took her all around the world for work, Linn reinvented herself as a decorative painter so she could spend more time here in Westport with her family. Her fascination with eggs began during her childhood in bucolic Western Pennsylvania. There, she spent many hours helping out at her aunt’s farm and began to appreciate both the shape and promise of the egg. She learned how to “candle” the eggs to determine their condition. This experience, and her deep comfort with the sights and sounds of nature, led her to focus on the form and function of the egg in her art, including a photographic collaboration with her son which explores fresh and frozen eggs (the yolks sink in the former and rise in the latter). Some of these currently hang on the walls at Sherwood Diner.
Linn has amassed a collection of thousands of eggs and has created egg images in many media, including painting, photography, and prints. For egg-ample the Center for Contemporary Printmaking in Norwalk, she began making encaustic collagraphs by sinking eggshells into plates – and has sold both the prints and the plates, which are, themselves, works of art.
Both her collection and her work is eggs-traordinary, and we’d encourage you to have a look at it, both in downtown Westport, and on her website.