Butler County
Mixed Media – Petri Dish Art
Growing up in Indiana, Barb watched family
members create items from wood, crocheted items and quilts. She said “It was
only natural I would get the creative bug and learn to crochet, macramé,
weaving, sewing and almost every other craft I could get my hands on.”
Barb’s husband was transferred to
Greenville, Alabama, in 1999, where, she comments, “the people here are just as
nice as the weather.” After she quit a position she had she “realized that with
the children gone it would be the perfect time to stay at home and do some
artwork.”
The internet provided a “beautiful and
intriguing” article on petri dish art.
Barb did quite a lot of research only to learn that there was one artist in the
world producing this form of art work, and she said “I wanted to make them
too”. Through trial and error she finally came up with the recipe for
success. Along the way she said “I
almost burned the house down, I ended up at the doctor once because I didn’t
wear a respirator”.
Her materials, which include epoxy resin,
paints, powders, oils and dyes, are found on the internet and science lab
supply houses. A finished piece takes from five to seven days to create. She described the process as “I’ll have 1 to
2 layers in a dish, and then it will let me know what will look good on the
next layer. When that reacts and dries
it may be totally different of what I envisioned, but I can tell what will work
on the next layer. From start to finish
it’s usually totally different from the initial idea.