It Takes A Village To Make A City

Lie on the floor of Creative Arts Workshop’s gallery and it’s as though you’re a bird flying through the towers of a fantastical metropolis, full of towers of every dimension, seemingly stretching for miles. It would be impressive enough as the work of one or two artists, mimicking so convincingly the cacophony of so many of the world’s major cities. It’s that much more interesting to discover that this city was built by almost as many people as there are buildings — and like a real city, it takes in something of their memories and their dreams.

The city stretching across the floor is the centerpiece of ​“The Village Project” at CAW on Aududon Street, which is closing this week on April 4 with an artist’s talk that day at 6 p.m.

The project was created by Norwalk-based artist Denise Minnerly, in collaboration with Don Bracken of Cornwall Bridge. Those who visit the exhibit are invited to make their own houses from clay provided in a workroom next door to the gallery. Finished piece are fired in a kiln and then added to the installation. If the current scale of the village is any indication, many people have taken the artists up on their offer, creating a piece that — again like a real city — is a delight to explore.

Minnerly’s and Bracken’s own hands in the project begin with the cloud of vines and roots hovering over the growing city, and the sensibility they share is on full display, somehow both hopeful and sinister at the same time. The shapes made from the vines flow so naturally that it’s possible to believe that the vines were found that way, maybe growing around a rock formation. This makes the relationship between the vines and the city feel on one hand symbiotic, one nourishing the other. Viewed another way, however, the vines could be an enormous cloud, drenching the city with a torrential storm; viewed still another way, it can be seen as a mushroom cloud. The ambiguity in it makes it that much more absorbing.

The accompanying artworks make the ambiguity seem quite intentional, also. Bracken’s Out of the Ashes, made from actual wood ash, seems both funereal and uplifting.

And the moving Road to Baghdad finds the shapes of a city in the cracks in stone, as if a monument to the destruction wrought there and a statement about the persistence of one of the oldest cities on the planet.

If Bracken’s work tilts toward the desolate with a sense of hope, Minnerly’s can be read as flipping the formula, as her drawings have a whimsical, almost cartoonish element to them, leavened with eeriness. Her Family Tree is alluring for the alienness of its landscape, and yet it’s unclear whether it’s the sort of place one might want to linger.

And the barren town and bleak sky in Fiddlehead still make room for the subject of the painting to fly a kite — even if it’s unclear whether the plants springing up in the path the boy’s feet have taken are chasing him, or whether he has created them.

But it’s the city in the center that carries the most weight, particularly as the artists have thrown open the doors of creation to anyone who is curious. This Saturday afternoon found a group of four people making houses from clay. One was Manxi Han, who took the idea of creating a house and applied it to animals to make a clay nest, complete with bird and eggs.

Her brother Mengzhou, meanwhile, sought first to make a Hot Wheel car, but it proved a little tricky. So he made a mushroom house instead. ​“He likes mushrooms,” his mother Sali Zhao explained, although ​“he doesn’t like to eat mushrooms.”

The family had visited Creative Arts Workshop thanks to Lili Zeng, who was on her third or fourth trip. ​“I find it very interesting,” she said, expressing the hope that CAW would take on more participatory projects like this.

The first few objects she made, she posted on social media, and drummed up interest from others. ​“Where is it?” she recalled her friends and acquaintances asking. ​“Can you go there and make something? And I said, ​‘of course you can.’” Evidence of this was clustered on the shelves behind her, in the form of new miniature buildings waiting to be fired.

Zeng lives in New Haven; she came here from China when her husband was admitted to study at Yale. She wasn’t an artist by trade or even my hobby. In fact, she hadn’t worked with clay since she was a child.

“When I was very young, I used clay in elementary school,” she said. And outside of it, too. In the village in China where she grew up, ​“we didn’t have a lot of things like toys, but under the bridge near school, there was clay in the ground.” She worked that clay, too, to make things that suited her fancy. ​“This,” she said, indicating the workshop she was in, ​“made me think of when I was young.”

The imagination of Zeng’s youth was also the inspiration for the form her clay house took on Saturday. ​“My dream when I was a little girl was that I could live in a fairy house,” she said. She looked online at images of other artists’ conceptions of what fairy houses might look like to get ideas for her own house, and took it from there. Because she was drawing from her childhood dreams, ​“I called it my dream house,” she said.

Zeng reported that she wasn’t the only person who found an imaginative spark rekindled by the project to build a village that was rapidly turning into a city. The friends she had brought with her on a previous trip also didn’t think, at first, that they still had the creativity they had when they were younger. ​“After they came here,” however, Zeng said, ​“they thought, ​‘wow! We are still artists.’”

“The Village Project” runs at Creative Arts Workshop, 80 Audubon Street, through April 4. The artist’s talk happens at 6 p.m. For more information click here.