Meet Artist Marcie Scudder

Components of Mon Hiver (2022), paper sculpture installation.

Mon Hiver (2022), paper sculpture installation.

Coquelicots (2023), paper sculpture installation.

Components of Coquelicots (2023), paper sculpture installation.

Kaleidoscope (2022), 32″H x 48″W, archival inkjet photographic print.

October Rain (2021), 32″H x 48″W, archival inkjet photographic print.

My Mother’s Garden (2021), paper sculpture installation.

Components of My Mother’s Garden (2021), paper sculpture installation.

Earth’s End (2022), 32″H x 48″W, archival inkjet photographic print.

As Stowe-based artist Marcie Scudder walks through the beautiful, lush gardens that surround her hillside home, she pauses to point out the poppies, forget-me-nots, black-eyed Susans, and other flowers that have inspired her latest creations. “I’m so lucky to be surrounded by beautiful flowers like these, as well as the rest of Vermont’s gorgeous landscape,” she says. “I always knew I had to incorporate these colors, shapes, and forms into my artwork.”

After working as an architect in Newton, Massachusetts, for twenty-five years, Scudder retired and moved to the home she had designed for her mother in Stowe. An accomplished fine art photographer, she was hungry for a change and began studying for an MFA at Maine Media Workshops + College. “I loved photography, but I felt I needed a new artistic perspective, a new direction,” she explains.

That new direction led her on a journey from two dimensions to three, from photography to paper sculpture. “It was so liberating to free myself from photography’s limited two-dimensional world and explore the three-dimensional world of paper sculptures,” she explains.

Scudder, however, did not abandon photography. Rather, she has used it as the basis, or the starting point, for her new hanging quilt-like paper sculptural creations. She creates these by printing her own photographs, cutting them up, folding them into complex origami-like units, then sewing them together into flowing three-dimensional abstract paper sculptures. The sculptures vary in shape and proportion, from pieces that could fit on a tabletop to room-size installations that reach from floor to ceiling.

Scudder’s works are layered with meaning and rich with metaphor. For example, one of her paper
installations, My Mother’s Garden, is comprised of scores of folded photos of flowers she photographed from her mother’s own garden. “I wanted to remind us that we are all our mothers’ gardens,” she explains. “We grow and bloom and have children that also become parents. We are all the seeds that our mothers planted.”

As she sits at her worktable in her studio that overlooks a verdant landscape, she admits, “I’m not yet sure what this next sculpture will be. But I am happy to let my mind and hands wander until I connect with some essential truth. It’s how I learn. It’s how I feel.”

EDITOR’S NOTE: To see more of Marcie Scudder’s work, visit marciescudder.com.