Making Montecito Mud into Art

The Santa Barbara Bucket Brigade has moved into a new phase of recovery from the Montecito Debris Flow, one that focuses on mud removal from public places and other manners of outdoor beautification. But a couple of local artists who are connected to Santa Barbara area colleges have beaten them to the punch, dipping into the amassed mud piles to create projects that are open to the public.

Brooke Smiley‘s Permission to Heal is inspired by the Venus of Willendorf, a 4½-inch amulet found 110 years ago in Austria that dates back to about 25,000 B.C. “She’s the very first depiction of a woman, a primitive fertility goddess,” Smiley said. “What I love about her is that nobody tried to change her, make her something that she wasn’t.”

Smiley’s version is nearly six feet tall and was unveiled during April’s 1^st Thursday as part of the State of the Art exhibition encompassing eight sculptures fashioned by Santa Barbara artists that will remain on display on lower State Street through Sunday, June 10. The sculpture is a “super adobe” constructed entirely of mud collected from the Montecito disaster fashioned on a base of Manning Park-distributed sandbags and some barbed wire.

“The mud that went through our community and shifted and changed not only the earth but people’s lives were deemed toxic and unsafe,” explained the self-described “kinetic and visceral” artist, who also teaches dance at UCSB and is studying as a Somatic Movement Educator, as she put finishing touches on the piece during the April 1^st Thursday opening night. “Like the people who were affected, the material itself has been through a lot. It’s on the outskirts of town, and we had no place to come and be in our bodies with it. I wanted this piece to be a place where people could come and just be with the Montecito mud in a healthy way.”

The sculpture was also created to serve as symbol to surviving, a monument to nature’s power.

“I made her very strong to withstand the public and the weather,” Smiley said, noting that she’d previously built earth domes for indigenous communities abroad and created an adobe classroom structure for an exhibition on London South Bank for the Queen’s Jubilee.

“This technique is earthquake-, flood- and fire-proof,” she explained. “It only gets stronger in these natural disasters. That’s what inspired me – the concept of sustainable architecture.”

Permission to Heal’s placement just a few feet from the corner of Anapamu Street was a happy coincidence, said Smiley, whose father is of part-Native American heritage. “Anapamu means ‘The rising place.’ As I was building her with my mom, we kept saying, ‘She’s rising. Let her rise.’ Then we saw the plaque around the corner and discovered that this was a place where the Chumash would come and give offerings for protection or for their dreams to rise.”

As Smiley was explaining the personal connection, a passerby asked if she could touch the sculpture.

“Oh, yeah. Rub her up. That’s why she’s here.”

Meanwhile, there are still a couple of days to catch SBCC art student Lily Pon‘s memorial artwork that was also created out of the mud from the Montecito debris flow. Solid to Liquid, Liquid to Solid features almost 3,000 individually hand-formed ceramic flowers that Pon arranged to create a negative space depicting a small human child the fetal position. Pon sifted the Montecito mud to make her own clay with which to craft the flowers that were then fired in SBCC Art Department’s kilns. The idea was to symbolize the fragility of life, as well as the resilience and stabilization that comes through community. The memorial made its debut in mid-April on the Winslow Maxwell Overlook, the expansive lawn with panoramic views of the Santa Barbara harbor, city, mountains, and ocean at the community college, which had housed the Red House evacuation shelter and had many of its students and staff affected by the disaster. Solid to Liquid, Liquid to Solid was then moved to the nearby Atkinson Gallery on campus, where it remains on view until Friday, May 11, as part of the annual student exhibition.