Jim Escalante
“Cordyceps Extraction Kit” (2017).
Chloe Darke, a UW-Madison graduate student and winner of the 2019 Russell and Paula Panczenko MFA Prize, is a highly accomplished metals artist and professional silversmith whose muse has taken her down some strange and horrific paths.
During her years as a professional silversmith in Boston, Darke became known for her domestic vessels, flatware and other implements, some of which are currently on display as part of the Museum of Wisconsin Art’s Handmade for the Home exhibit in West Bend. But darker visions dominate Secrete, Augment, Testify: Works by Chloe Darke, on display at the Chazen Museum of Art April 26-June 16. Much of the artist’s work, a violent collision between fine jewelry and fanciful renditions of imagined lab equipment and medical implements, occupies the sometimes unsettling display.
“’Secrete’ refers to the growth of individual cultures or bodily fluids,” Darke explains. “With
‘Augment,’ I had read about Louis Pasteur and his use of something small from the outside world to augment his work developing an anthrax vaccine.
“‘Testify’ was picked for its double meaning,” she adds. “If you work in a lab or medical setting, there’s often need to report progress. This can refer to both science and art, and can affect social values, including my own.”
The exhibit’s signature image, “Cordyceps Extraction Kit,” best embodies the three-part theme. Framed by a red brass tray, the three-dimensional piece contains a variety of fanciful, although not functional, faux surgical appliances, including a vicious double corkscrew that hangs on a delicate chain.
Cordyceps is a fungus that feeds on insects, most notably carpenter ants. The fungus invades its hosts’ bodies and takes control of their muscles, causing them to climb the nearest plant to its highest levels and clamp down their mandibles to hold it in place. Once situated, the
“Scrape”(2018).
fungus grows a long tubular extrusion from the insect’s body or head, roughly twice its body length, from which it distributes its spores over as wide an area as possible while feeding on the insect’s remains.
“I saw this on the BBC series Planet Earth and wondered what would happen if the fungus could do that to humans,” Darke says of a narrative worthy of a Stephen King horror novel.
Did I mention that last year the artist also grew 10 different types of fungi in petri dishes in her studio? Cordyceps, she says, was not among them.
Seven of Darke’s fungus photos are included in the exhibit, along with metalwork creations with names such as “Dental Gag,” “Prop and Probe,” “Scrape” and “Shear.” All are jewelry-implement hybrids similar to “Cordyceps Extraction Kit,” representing imagined tool forms that are decorative but not functional.
“The tools have become almost fetish objects to me in that they have beauty, but also are repulsive,” Darke says. “That’s why I am drawn to them.”
