Visual Artist

Marcie Scudder

VERMONT, USA

Marcie Scudder is a lens-based, multidisciplinary artist. Her work threads the fine line between memory and material, body and landscape. Her practice revolves around themes of fragility and loss, renewal and resilience; an ongoing meditation on how we remember, what we carry forward, and what inevitably slips away.

Raised by a mother who was both a Holocaust survivor and a fiber artist, Scudder has long understood art-making as an act of both survival and transmission. That inheritance lives in her practice today - photographs that are folded, stitched, and sculpted into paper forms, dresses, and installations. They become spaces of lineage; holding quiet conversations between generations while weaving together the deeply personal with the universal.

Scudder holds an MFA in Visual Arts from Maine Media College and a B.Arch. from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. After three decades of running her own architectural practice, she turned to photography as a daily discipline - a kind of Zen practice - that has evolved into a sculptural language of its own.

Her work has been exhibited at the Wilson Museum at Southern Vermont Arts Center, the Kent Museum, AVA Gallery, Studio Place Arts, SE Center for Photography, and Davis-Orton Gallery; and featured in Lenscratch, Still Point Quarterly, NE Home Magazine, Stowe Magazine, and Catchlight

She lives and works in Stowe, Vermont - where winter is long, summer is.

What are you making right now?

I like to work on a number of projects simultaneously. I’m working on finishing up a chuppah for a wedding dress I made: A Prayer for our Daughters – may you be like Sarah, Rachel, Rebecca and Leah. I’m working on two additional dress sculptures – Pruah and Shifra. Telling the stories of the two midwives who defied Pharoh’s commands and let Moses live. Lastly – I’m working on a collection of houses as impermanent vessels symbolizing the temporary nature of the homes we live in. They may appear to hold our stories, but our stories are carried within. Passed from one generation to the next. From the shtetl to the ghetto to the kibbutz, where the garden continues to grow.

If you could spend an hour with anyone you admire, living or dead, who would it be and what would you ask them?

I would ask how he/she/they maintains their center and creativity, how they have the courage to speak their true voice. I would want to know what sustains and older artist. one who has come to an art practice later in life. I would want to hear the person's her/history and what motivates and inspires. Mostly - I'd just want to understand and learn and grow from wherever our conversation may lead.

What would you like people to understand about your work?

I am a Jewish American artist. When my mother died, I was left with her house and her garden. The garden—with its cycles of growth, decay, and renewal—has become my metaphorical, spiritual and physical muse. It is there - each sculpture and site specific installation begins, among the flowers she planted and the seasons that carry on. The Oct. 7th massacre changed my view of myself and the world. Perhaps – I had chosen to live my live in a state of denial. Following that horrific event and the subsequent rise in anti-semitism. I now feel it an imperative to share stories of my Jewish history and lineage through my art; to honor and remember, and to never forget. The eldest child of a Holocaust survivor. I am here due only to the kindness of strangers and miracle of fate. Never again is now.

What medium do you work in and what drew you to it?

My current medium of choice is paper. In its most organic form – paper is made of the cellulose fibres found in cotton, wood, grasses and flowers, deeply connected and rooted in this good earth. It is the strength and resilience of those flowers that forms thin fibrous sheets on which I print, then cut and fold. I work with thread. Its filaments twisted together form a continuous unbreakable strand. It connects and heals and binds us together. And – I work with photographs of the garden and the ground in which it grows.

What do you need in your workspace to spark creativity?

I need time and space to experiment and explore and make lots and lots of mistakes. I often begin my time in the studio with a simple journaling exercise - where I cut and paste bits of paper into abstractions that don't often make sense, but always do. I listen to podcasts, books and music.

Has your identity, culture, heritage, or community influenced your creative practice?

Absolutely. I am Canadian by birth. American by marriage. Jewish by my lineage and DNA. My Jewish identity, culture and lineage are what most guide my work. We are descendants of people who overcame the unimaginable. We are survivors. We are heroes - both men and especially women. We are David's in a world of Goliath's. Those quiet stories of those who defied authority and fought against all odds - are the stories I need to tell. The 's'heroes. The silent resistors. I defer to my maternal lineage and the women in my life as the ones to whom I am most indebted. We exist only because of those who fought so valiantly, or - in my mother's case - had the strength and grit and determination to survive. It's the heart and soul of who I am, and all that drives my creative practice.

What does success look like to you as a creative?

Success would mean the opportunity to share my work along with the stories that guide and inform. I'd like to fill a space, while allowing each piece to speak. Success is simply showing up every day and doing one small thing that guides and leads in the direction I'm going.