By Pam Rosenblatt

Artist Riki Moss wasn’t planning on calling Somerville home for too long, but more than a decade has gone by, and Moss is enjoying being a member of the local arts community. It was 1995 when she first came to Somerville.

‚ÄúI thought I‚Äôd just be here for a little while when I left Vermont,‚Äù said Moss. ‚ÄúBut it right away made me feel like (I was in) Brooklyn.  And I didn‚Äôt realize that I was nostalgic for Brooklyn.‚Äù

Born in Brooklyn, N.Y. and prior to Somerville living in Vermont, artwork and lifestyle have a bit of two places close to her heart. Living in Somerville reminds her of her Brooklyn days. And her art shows signs of Vermont, where she still has a cabin in the woods, even though she resides with her husband, Robert, in Somerville’s Brickbottom Artists Building.

Moss’s paper sculptures are often in the forms of cocoons. Why does she make paper sculptures in the shapes of cocoons?

“I have a cabin in the woods in Vermont on Lake Champlain. I have no studio space up there. I work outside. So, I started looking at the shapes around me, and what I saw were cocoons and garlic in my garden, and things morphing from one thing to another,” she said. “And when I worked with clay, it had the same intuitive reaction to the material and the environment in nature.”

Moss has been working with paper sculptures for a year and is expanding into making light sculptures with it. It’s a new venue with an interesting process. The paper sculptures are created out of a kind of banana leaf found in the Philippines.

“And my idea is that somehow there’s a village of Pilipino people who take this fiber, oil it down and pound it into sheets. By the time I get it, it’s in a sheet form and we tear it up again and put it through a beater,” she said.

The paper is beaten for seven hours.  Such over beaten paper wouldn‚Äôt be used by a papermaker, she said. ‚ÄúBut, we use it as an over beaten paper.  The fibers get cut up a great deal and they get very small, and that means they have a very high shrinkage,‚Äù she said.

The end product is a solid, almost concrete like material that is in many different shapes and forms. 
‚ÄúI‚Äôm interested in a point of where something is in process of becoming something else and where some part of it is dying and transmorphing, another part of it is waking up,‚Äù Moss said. 

That changing point is not easy to achieve. “Because,” she said, “it’s easy to slide from one object to another and to solidify positions and lose activity, the feeling of action, the feeling of liveliness inside it.”

Moss enjoys doing installations with her translucent sculptures. 

“I love to have a big space and let things look at the space and see what I should be doing,” she said. “I have an ongoing installation in my studio that I call a paper forest that works off whatever. But they’re basically forms that come from my experience in the woods and the forests. And it’s always changing. I have a little studio at Joy Street, across the hall from my working studio, and I exhibit that installation in there. It’s always changing. And usually it gets shown for Open Studios, Joy Street Open Studios, once or twice a year.”

Moss left New York for the University of Chicago where she received a degree in human development. She was being considered for a scholarship in a graduate program when the head of the program advised her to take a year away from the field, and if she was still interested in a career in human development, she could enter the program then on a full scholarship, Moss said.

She decided to go to San Francisco. It was a very exciting time for that area.  She walked into the San Francisco Art Institute to hear Janis Joplin and the Grateful Dead jam and ended up learning all about ceramics.

‚ÄúI fell in love with clay,‚Äù she said.  ‚ÄúAnd that was the end of everything.‚Äù 

She never went back to Chicago to attend that graduate program in human development.

“The Art Institute was very different then it is now. It was a small kind of magical place with this little courtyard. And we lived on Chestnut Street. And in the back there was this shack. People were building kilns around giant end piece of clay works, bringing clay into abstract expressionism with what had happened with painting way back,” she said. “So, it was a really exciting time. I didn’t learn how to throw or make a functional piece until years after that.”

After studying at the San Francisco Art Institute for two years, Moss returned to New York City, worked with a couple of potters and set up a studio and loft on Wall Street. 

Then she relocated to Vermont and worked with clay in a studio there. 

“I was working as a studio potter for 20 years. And then I went to the University of Vermont and then Vermont College, which is a low residency graduate program,” she said.

Moss has exhibited her paper sculptures in ‚ÄúThe Green Line‚Äù exhibition at Brickbottom Gallery and the Nave Gallery and at the Tufts University Fourth Annual Summer Juried Exhibition. From September through December, she will be showing her work at The Gallery, 38 Cameron St., Cambridge, and will have a piece exhibited with the Cambridge Art Association in September.