November Art Exhibit
Donlin Foreman with Jaya Lord - Horse Hill Studio (North Room)
Leather Works
&
“Little Worlds”: Dollhouses, Dioramas, Shadow Boxes (South Room)
Including works by Soosen Dunholter, Susan Lunt, Rosemary Mack, Jane El Simpson and Rachel Thorne Germond
Opening Reception: Friday, November 13 at 5:00-7:00pm
Exhibit runs Wed, Nov 11 - Sunday, Nov 29
Available for viewing during DubHub open hours and by appointment.
contact: Info@dublincommunitycenter.org
NORTH ROOM: Donlin Foreman & Jaya Lord (Horse Hill Studio)
Donlin Foreman lives in the vital historic village of Harrisville, New Hampshire with his wife and their daughter and son. For several years now he’s run a small studio, crafting leather pieces with roofing slate and repurposed wood. The windows of the studio, in the Cheshire Mills complex, look out on the cascading waters of the mill creek. Donlin is proud to be a juried member of the League of New Hampshire Craftsmen and the Walpole Artisans Co-op. Seasonal pieces can be found at Hannah Grimes Marketplace in Keene, NH. Leather work/craft is a theme, a first love, that has been with him throughout his life.
For more info see: https://www.horsehillstudio.com/
Jaya Lord
More info coming soon
About Horse Hill Studio
Utility, Identity and Craft are the underpinnings of the work of Horse Hill Studio. Out of leather and found objects we fashion things hands and eyes can hold. Most of what we love to make are vessels. These hold aspects of our lives: talismans that hold our prayers, handles that our hands hold, broaches and small boxes made from walnuts that hold keepsakes. There are bowls and trays and satchels, door boards for keys, and slate and leather wall hangs that hold our attention and imagination.
SOUTH ROOM:
“Little Worlds”- Dollhouses, Dioramas & Shadow Boxes
Soosen Dunholter, Rosemary Mack, Jane El Simpson, Susan Lunt,
and Rachel Thorne Germond
Soosen Dunholter
Soosen’s mixed-media work in drawing, painting, and printmaking has been exhibited in solo and group shows in galleries and cultural centers throughout New England for over 20 years and hangs in private and public collections around the world. Her work is widely collected and has been licensed for books, magazines, and music CDs. She has won numerous awards and prizes including the 2016 Ruth and James Ewing Award for Exceptional Achievement in the Creative Arts. Primarily a Printmaker and mixed media artist, Soosen is never far from her roots in painting and graphic design as a former art director with a focus on book publication. On any given day you can find her in her spacious, eclectic studio adjacent to her home in Peterborough, NH creating a variety of sophisticated yet whimsical prints, collages, and paintings. In the summer she draws ideas from her surroundings by dividing her time between the studio and the many cottage-style gardens clustered around her home.
Artist Statement
For me, the process is everything. I’m not only focused on the final piece—I’m equally drawn to how it comes into being. Experimenting, layering, and letting the materials take the lead often feels like a conversation, where each step reveals something new. I work with traditional tools but also enjoy bending the rules, using them in ways they weren’t originally meant to be used. That tension between the familiar and the unexpected keeps the work alive. Whether I’m making prints, collages, or design pieces, I aim to create something that feels engaging and invites a second look—something that nudges the viewer to see a little differently. At its core, my practice is about curiosity and process—about exploring what happens when different elements meet and following where they lead.
Jane El Simpson
Winner of 2019 Ewing Arts excellence in the arts award, Jane Simpson's work incorporates diverse mediums, including mixed media and visual storytelling. She has a deep passion for history and preservation, often creating new art by stitching, sewing, and using recycled materials, vintage cards, and artifacts. Outside of her studio work, she runs a professional practice as a picture framer, located in Peterborough, NH.Found materials play a leading role in my artwork. The thrill of discovery can happen on a walk or at a local swap-shop. Ideas sprout from pithy quotes or a book, from a relationship or travel, imagining a secret persona for my cat, or a season. The poet Ruth Stone once said that she could hear and feel a poem racing toward her from across a field - before it would reach her, she’d run indoors to grab a pencil and write it down, otherwise it would be lost. While I do not feel similar urgency, I am always curious, mystified and delighted when creativity takes form in paint, paper, words, notes, wood, prints, textile or thread.
Artist Statement
Recently, I relocated and reconfigured my artmaking space. Collections of treasured supplies were rediscovered, ideas-in-waiting rekindled. I’m eager to see where new-space energy will take my work. I feel fortunate to have lived a free range childhood in rural New Hampshire; roaming fields, forests and rural roads on two feet, two wheels or four hooves, occasionally finding youthful trouble —--like the time. A short list of inspirations: Bird nests, Lee Bountecou, Small stones, Shadow, Pine needles, Seed pods, String, Aged ephemera, Blackwing pencils, Grass.
Rosemary Mack
Born on Dec. 25, 1950 Rosemary Mack embodies the Capricorn trait of being old when young and young when old. Enrolled at age 64 in Frankie Brackley Tolman's painting class she discovered assemblage art and never looked back. Within five years she had made over 60 pieces, occasionally entering shows at Sharon Arts, Thorne-Sagendorph and Kendall Jenkins. In April 2020 Art New England named her as one of 10 emerging artists.
From 2019 to 2020, she also began contributing to a public art project, "Tiny Pricks" by artist and activist Diana Weymar. Rosemary embroidered over 70 textiles, two being featured in Business Insider. A member of Monadnock Art, she enjoys participating in the annual Art Tour at her studio in Dublin ,NH.
Artist Statement
Assemblage art ushered in my second childhood. My studio is a playhouse filled with dolls, toys, board games and endless oddball bits and pieces that I collect but also sometimes just appear in my life when I need them! Shadow boxes, dioramas and goofy 3-D cartoons let me explore personal issues as well as take an off-kilter look at the world. Growing up on fairy tales, mis-guided advice and proverbs has provided endless inspiration. Contemporary life has as well. Gender issues are frequent topics and among the most popular. Being entirely self-taught, each piece teaches me something new. I love the entire process—developing an idea, having it take shape and figuring out the mechanics. The final piece is never exactly what I envisioned, and this evolution is my favorite part. Sometimes it means completely starting over, but the end result is always better than the original idea. Finding this path also just appeared when I needed it. I feel fortunate to have found something late in life that makes me laugh an eager to start the day. What I do isn’t “fine art,”but it’s definitely fun art.”
Susan Lunt attended art school as an adult, earning her BFA in 2011 at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, in Boston, MA. A painter and multimedia artist, her work frequently features ‘not quite right’ spaces that reflect emotional and cultural losses from the old new millennium to the new. Her room boxes and dioramas offer a counterpoint to these themes, presenting in visual form the wry storytelling tradition of her Northern New Hampshire family.
“I’ve arrived at a place in my art where it is okay to have two voices, a humorous one and a haunted one,” she explains.
Born on a farm in Meredith, NH, Susan’s earliest memory of formal art were the Andrew Wyeth prints that hung in her home. Early influences were her maternal grandparents, Edward and Marjorie Bradford, both artists, and her paternal grandmother, Margaret Pynn Lunt, of Meredith, an embroidery teacher and author, and a founding member of the League of New Hampshire Craftsmen.
Susan’s current studio is the former Odd Fellows ballroom in Marlborough, NH, where she has pursued collaborations with other area artists. She curated multi-artist, themed shows in 2023 and 2024, featuring paintings, assemblages, drawings and sculpture. In each show she featured an emerging artist who had never been part of a show, one of whom had made a nine-foot tall mural in his barn.
A Solo show, Is She Pretty?, in 2011, featured her conceptual work in drawings, multi-media and sculpture using found objects at The Studio Gallery, in Laconia NH. From 2010 to 2019, she curated biannual stand-alone window exhibits, on Canal Street in Laconia NH. Group shows in her Marlborough studio at 170 Main St Marlborough NH include Our Marble(s), in 2023, and From That to This, in 2024. She participated in the Monadnock Art Tour Gallery Exhibition, in 2024 in Peterborough, NH, where she exhibited three of her paintings.
Susan lives with her husband, pianist and composer Mark Ferguson, in Harrisville NH.
Artist Statement
Old things carry a sense of life; part tragic and part funny. I used to feel that the assemblages I made from them were ‘un-serious’ art, but now I know they are essential. Our planet seems chaotic to me, but in these dressed-up little worlds, the story, and the feeling of the story, are under my control. I never tire of their mystery and irony.
Last year I took this mini obsession to a new level. A large dollhouse had been returned to its owner so altered and damaged she barely recognized it. Together, we explored how an object can hold meaning and memory, and what to do if those things seem lost. I am thankful to her for the loan of the now-renovated house for this show.
Inspired by the resurrection of the big house, I began a series of small dioramas from a collection of 1930’s department-store Christmas boxes I found in a family trunk. After archiving their contents, I used the still-lovely papered boxes to hold a new family narrative; one with the wry family humor I remember, especially my father's. His deadpan stories about people in our ‘neck of the woods’ offered one-of-a-kind life ‘lessons,’ that you’d better believe I still refer to. “Don’t go ‘glamping’ in bear territory,” for instance.
Like the doll house that once again evokes pieces of the past, a half-forgotten story —perhaps holding a memory of this lost person, is made visible in the very box that once contained his mother’s baby gown.
Still image from the short dance film Shadow Box - by Rachel Thorne Germond and Charles Woodman to be screened at the November 13 opening reception
Rachel Thorne Germond earned a BFA in studio art (Printmaking and Photography) from Cornell University’s College of Art, Architecture and Planning and an MFA in Dance and Choreography from the University of Illinois Champaign Urbana (2000). She has presented her visual art in New York City, Wellfleet, MA, Bisbee, AZ and the Monadnock Region - often combining her art with live performances that include video projections, text, and choreography under the auspices of Rachel Thorne Germond Performance Collage (aka RTG Dance).
www.rachelthornegermond.com