Words Anna Godbersen  Photographs Guzman

Originally published in No 10

Down Heart’s Content Road, there is an 18th-century farmhouse, a real collector’s house, where the artist Portia Munson and her family live. The place has the feel of a wild museum, curated by some urbane naturalist. If there is one of something, look around, there is likely another of the same type: candles, their wax dried while dripping down candelabras so they look voluminous as ballgowns; seashells in a giant clamshell; framed butterflies following the upward zigzag of stairs; Suzani textiles from Uzbekistan making hopscotch patterns across the wooden floor. 

The collecting impulse that has rendered the place a visual feast is not materialist, like the impulse to hoard fine wine or rare antiques. Nor is the collecting of the fearful, stockpiling variety. The spirit in which the objects here are displayed is both superabundant and thoughtful, orderly. The objects appear edited to exist in harmony with their human cohabitants, neither overwhelming the other. Like Munson’s work, the guiding aesthetic seems to toggle between a brilliant maximalism and minimalist restraint. 

“I get a real pleasure out of ordering,” says Munson. “A lot of my work is about observing what’s around me and then ordering it in a way that draws attention to what I’ve been thinking.” 

Munson and her husband, the artist Jared Handelsman (his work, like that of his wife, defies categorization, though it has a land art vibe), moved to Catskill in the 1990s. The 83-acre property has been in her family since the 1930s, when her great grandparents left Brooklyn to escape the Depression, and bears evidence of previous inhabitants, too — arrow heads, pottery shards, the remains of an apple orchard, an old cemetery. 

On a hazy day in late September, the area immediately surrounding the house was busy with life. The garden where Munson grows zinnias, cosmos, sunflowers, kale, basil and garlic, among other decorative and edible crops, was visible from the kitchen window, as was Handelsman’s monumental, site specific, Blueberry Spiral. The house is itself a creative feat, and one can easily see the visual connection between Munson’s mantel and her oeuvre. “I love the domestic, I love the home and making the home feel alive and colorful, thinking about inside and outside. I get inspiration from it.” 

But Munson, who speaks articulately about her art practice, does draw the line between the two: her home, “is an extension of [her] work, but it’s different.” To discuss the difference, we walk through dense greenery of the back yard, past several shipping containers used as storage, to the New World Dutch barn, which the couple transported from a nearby property to use as their studio. (The original barn disappeared around the time of the Second World War, when the property was briefly leased to a farmer who may have used the old structure for firewood.) Handelsman’s studio is on the first floor, Munson’s on the second. Here, under the enormous wood ceiling, the prolific and diverse nature of her work is on display. Installation projects, paintings, drawings, the prints that make use of natural materials. Although the techniques vary, there is a unifying beauty and thematic interest in the feminine and the environment, themes that Munson has meditated on throughout her career. 

When I visited, she was preparing to reconstruct her densely floral 1993 installation The Garden for Art Basel Miami — re-wiring lamps and fixing things up before they shipped. “I think of it like a period room, a historic room,” she says. “The first iteration of this was from when I lived in Cape Cod where they have swap shops at the dump. I would go every day and collect flowered things.” She was drawn to representations of flowers and nature, “stuff that’s very much associated with women.” Her son had just been born and her grandmothers were dying; she was contemplating both the life force and the funerary. “But it wasn’t so much about me,” she says. “I was more interrogating this stuff, what it says about our culture.” 

The phases of Munson’s work can be traced in colors, like the pink of the Pink Project, which she exhibited in the New Museum’s 1994 Bad Girls show. “In graduate school I was collecting pink things as subjects for painting. I had more and more and more, it was really taking up a lot of space, these piles of pink. I realized that was also part of the work, it wasn’t just the subject. The subject of the painting sort of overwhelmed the paintings. But whatever you’re doing, it’s all part of your work — that’s an idea I got from Jared, and found really liberating.”

Subsequent phases have dwelled in green (associations of gardens and the natural world) and blue (which tends to signify water and cleanliness in our culture, according to Munson, even more so than “boy”). Currently her studio is trending white. She was working on a new piece, Bound Angels, a kind of altar or banquet with a wedding dress as tablecloth, upon which numerous ceramic angels had been arranged and partially bound. Most of these were found in junk shops — “I’m just so amazed by the stuff that exists in the world, how when you’re looking for one type of thing, you find so many variations. I’ve found countless versions of these female figures represented as angels. They are basically mass produced, and yet it’s remarkable how strange they can be.”

Other projects in process include a short film, part of her ongoing Functional Women series, in which she plans to make use of different feminine figurines that also have a function. Women that are bells being rung. Women vases being filled with flowers. Women that are music boxes being activated. Munson’s collection of these cultural artifacts is truly remarkable: she has female pincushions, female cheese graters, female nutcrackers, as well as a female dustpan and broom, which she may film being used to sweep up petals. The strangeness becomes more obvious somehow in the sheer accumulation of like objects. “More is actually more,” Munson says. “More tells you more than if you only had one.” 

Yet not all her pieces draw their meaning from such massive agglomerations. A drawing of a functional woman mug has a different tone, a kind of elegant irony. And she is considering displaying a series of prints she did in the ‘90s, when she documented her menstrual blood, along with the largely white installations. They were made, she says, “by pressing paper against my body,” and they have the abstraction of Rorschach images — they suggest bats, butterflies, angels. Other older pieces seem to be speaking to the current work, too. She shows me her Self-Portrait without a Mouth, from 1989, as well as a series of paintings of cow tongues, which are very beautiful, with that gleaming precision of an Old Master still life. “For me it’s really important to do the paintings, too,” Munson says. “You really have to be looking at the object for a very long time. Looking, painting, looking, painting. You’re scrutinizing the object, trying to figure something out.”  

The prints that make use of the natural world reveal both the maximalist tendency in Munson’s work, as well as the orderly restraint. These are made by arranging the bodies of dead animals with flowers in a mandala-like pattern on a scanner in a dark room. A cedar waxwing she found dead in her garden in the middle of summer surrounded by bright pink, yellow and purple flowers she picked that day. A screech owl, that a friend hit with her car in the winter, circled by crocuses Munson had planted in the fall. “I do this to memorialize and honor the creature,” she says. “To document the moment in time when they died.” 

“I’m an intuitive artist, always responding to the world around me. The aesthetic of what I make is really important, I am always trying to make something beautiful, something that pulls you in but also is a little uncomfortable, a little disturbing, I’m interested in that balance, between the beautiful and the disturbing. That is the common theme of my work.”  

Has country life changed her work? Yes, she says, it would be difficult to make the mandalas if she lived in the city — but living close to the land informs her other work, too. In both cases, she says, she is trying to capture a moment in time. “I don’t want to make work that is nostalgic,” she says. “We live in the plastic age. The Earth is going to have this plastic coat around it from our era, and my work is a capsule of that time. Living where I do, feeling a connection to nature, that heightens how I can see other things, too. I am able to see these bizarre cultural ready-mades more than I would otherwise. Everything influences everything else.”

When we walked back through the house, I found that everything looked different. My eye was drawn to the gaudily colorful buggy blanket that was produced by the otherwise plain-dressing Amish. To the massive kitchen cutting board, made from a burl, which had been her grandmother’s. The hysterically vulgar “naughty Nellie” boot jack. We were back in the realm of the domestic, but the themes of Munson’s work echoed everywhere — the intelligence of nature, uncanny representations of the female form, that tension between multiplicity and simplicity, the fleeting nature of all things. As we parted, she gave me honey and maple syrup from her property that would last me until winter. 

Learn more: portiamunson.com

Anna Godbersen is the author of The New York Times bestselling Luxe series. Her latest novel Beautiful Wild is now available.

Guzman are regular contributors to UD @lesguzman They are repped by Veronique Peres Domergue.