GAMBIER – Kenyon College professor Gregory Spaid was recently one of 75 artists in Ohio to receive a $4,000 grant from the Ohio Arts Council.
Spaid was one of only 13 photographers to receive the grants. It is the eighth time he has been awarded an Ohio Arts Council grant.
“It’s an honor when you get one of these,” Spaid told the Mount Vernon News. “It’s a peer-reviewed process. So the panel that makes the decision on the grants tends to come from around the nation. The grants are hard to get.”
He plans to use the award to buy a new computer.
“I need a high-end computer in my work,” he said. “My computer is getting pretty old.”
Spaid is not a typical photographer.
“I’ve always liked bending the expectations about what photography is,” he said.
The photographs he entered in the grant competition are hand-made.
“They are camera-less,” Spaid said. “I make a negative by hand. I either make them 4-by-5 inches or 8-by-10.”
For the last six years, he has been focusing on trees.
“I collect leaves, and I go through an entire process of drying them out and flattening them,” Spaid said. “I do my best to make them semi-transparent. Then I cut the leaves into sort of designs. They still retain much of their quality as a leaf, but they are sort of like no other leaf you have ever seen before.”
In his mind, the leaves represent the wildness of nature.
“What I’m doing is imposing a kind of rationale that human beings have,” Spaid said. “There is a tension there between the two, I think. This is really about our environment and how we deal with environmental issues we’re facing.”
Humans often look at nature as a tool or resource.
“Nature doesn’t necessarily operate that way,” he said. “So there’s a tension between those two. With the environmental crisis we’re facing, we have to take a really close look at what we’re doing and why we’re doing it.”
Spaid glues the leaves to the negatives and then scans them to make digital images. It is a contemporary version of Cliché verre, a 19th-century French technique of drawing on glass and printing the drawings on light-sensitive materials.
Spaid joined the Kenyon faculty in 1979. He returned to teaching after serving six years as provost, the chief academic officer at the college.
The college provides a pastoral setting for his art.
“One of the things that is unique at Kenyon is that it is set in a very, very rural area,” he said. “You can hardly find another small liberal arts college that does as good a job academically as what Kenyon does in such a rural area.”
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