Former set designer enjoys recreating the local scene
Selene Plum
Portrait by Colby Rabon
Selene Plum’s aesthetic eye led to a successful — and totally unexpected — 20-year gig as a set designer and prop stylist. As the artist recalls, “I had a friend who was a producer for TV and photography. She approached me and said she loved how I dressed and how my home looked, and then hired me to be a set designer.
“At the time, I didn’t even know what a set designer was or what they did. But everyone loved my work, and it was a lot of fun. I was very lucky and blessed, because it opened up into a whole career.”
Then Plum decided she wanted to restart the journey that had begun for her in childhood, when her mother encouraged her love of drawing. “I took some art classes in junior-high school, and I was considered the artist in the family.” So, around age 40, while she was a single mom raising three small children, she enrolled at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she earned a BFA in 1996 and began to paint. She concentrated on oils, and was also introduced to painting with molten wax — and those remain her two favorite mediums.
Before moving to Asheville, where her attention turned to the local vernacular, Plum worked out of a 100-year-old farmhouse in rural Wisconsin, gardening and growing herbs. Her mother taught her gardening — “then my children learned it from me, and now I am able to share it with my grandchildren,” she says.
Lately, Plum has been working on a series of paintings titled Women’s Work, inspired by the history of Appalachian women and their relationships to the land. “I love the depth that those two words bring up and what that makes people think about.” Plum says being in the mountains makes her “feel connected” to the women who lived here in log cabins, raising families and crops under back-breaking conditions. “And I’m very interested in hand sewing, like those women and my grandmother and mother did — and my mother taught me to do.
“[Rural women] would sit together and do knitting, needlepoint, quilting, and crochet — it was their artwork. But the handiwork of those quilts kept families warm, and the bandages they made took care of them when they were injured.”
Plum is now incorporating into her paintings remnants of vintage and antique fabric piecework, which she finds in local resale shops. Pushing the notion even further, she’s also begun painting on old pieces of tobacco barn wood. “The old barns are starting to fall apart and disappear,” she observes, “and I like repurposing [the wood]. Some people who come to my studio will bring pieces of it to me.
“One of them was talking about how there are all these memories inside of wood. Tobacco farming is really hard work, and I read about how a lot of tobacco farmers were women.”
Her own conversations with nature lean toward intellectual exercises. Plum’s Moon Mudra series of paintings linger in the night sky, and are comments about Eastern spiritual rituals.
“I want them to end up being meditations, and for people to see how quiet they are.”
Throughout her work, Plum conveys the passage of time and the natural order of things – which can include the organic imperfections of the world. “There’s a history in each piece,” Plum points out, “and there are tons of mistakes in each piece – and I just work with them. In the end I fall in love with the ‘mistakes.’”
Such ruminations are the fruit of enjoying, for the first time, the freedom of her own full-time art studio. “Now I am finally starting to think that maybe I know what I’m doing,” she confides, “although it is still quite a learning experience.”
Selene Plum, Asheville, Riverview Station (191 Lyman St. #210 in the River Arts District, seleneplum.com, @selene_plum on Instagram). Plum’s work is represented by Tyger Tyger Gallery, #144 in Riverview Station, open Tuesday through Saturday, 10am-5pm, Sunday 11am-4pm (tygertygergallery.com).