by DAPHNE HUTCHINSON

by DAPHNE HUTCHINSON

Rappahannock News Staff Writer

Rebecca Howland’s Toxicological Table holds the spotlight at the Middle Street Gallery Artists’ Cooperative.

Square in the center of the room, the table draws the attention of gallery visitors. They’re seduced by the bright colors and clean lines of her ceramic plates, cups, bowls and vase. The warm shine of the surfaces invites picking up and begs to be held.

But a close look and the visitor knows this is art with a message— and it’s a grim message.

An ashtray in the shape of a lung is deformed with a growth that screams “cancer!” Black and white striped cups in the shape of storage barrels are smeared inside with poisonous looking blotches of color. Short poems are scrawled on the bowls:

Coal Diamonds Ashes Dust

Pick the Bones and Then Go Bust

Dioxin kills

They dump it and it always spills

U.S. citizens buy whole towns

After Industry ruins them

“It’s about the inter-relations between strip mining, burning coal to generate electricity and the resulting pollution of water and air,” said the New York artist who is on a month’s residency program in the .* county under a grant awarded to the Rappahannock Association for the Arts and the Community by the Mid-Atlantic States’ Arts Consortium.

“It’s about how we’re all being poisoned in our day-to-day life,” she said. “And it usually happens because of. . .” she added, tapping the big dollar sign on the centerpiece vase with her forefinger. “It’s been determined by economic factors, not human factors.” ,

She found the inspiration for the Toxicological Table in a trip she took 10 years ago through the coal mining country of Ohio, Kentucky and West Virginia. “It was pretty dismal. It really had an effect on me, although it didn’t become apparent for years.” The anger she felt at this rape of the environment combined with her love of the landscape and love of nature to generate the message in her table' work.

For the past five years, Ms. Howland has been carrying her message art to workshops she conducts on college campuses. She’s made eight Toxicological Tables; one purchased by the Museum of Modem Art in Stockholm, Sweden, and others exhibited by galleries in New York City, upstate New York, Cologne, West Germany, and now the Middle Street Gallery in Washington, Va.

“In my workshops, I stress two things,” the artist said. “Art should be about the world — the world of its own time — now — 1986. And it should be about something that the artist cares about deeply.”

She struck those dual themes in a mini-workshop she conducted for the senior citizens at Rappahannock’s nutrition site. As she passed out hunks of clay donated by local potter Jeanne Drevas, Ms. Howland asked the elderly men and women to think about things that created strong emotions, things that they either loved or hated.