- On this edition of ARTEFFECTS, wooden mosaics shaped on a lathe.

- I'm always looking at possibilities, endless possibilities.

It really accurately describes what it is we do as segmented woodturners.

- [Beth] Art that glows.

- Our idea was to create a kind of journey, shall we say, through the site with surprises around every corner.

- [Beth] And using the power of science to create unbelievable art.

- Describing myself is always a bit of a challenge.

I've kind of summed it up.

Equal parts artist, equal parts citizen scientist.

I think everything else I do kind of falls under that umbrella.

- That's all coming up on this edition of ARTEFFECTS.

(upbeat music) - [Announcer] Funding for ARTEFFECTS is made possible by Sandy Rafealli with Bill Pearce Motors, Heidimarie Rochlin, in memory of Sue McDowell, the Carol Franc Buck Foundation, and by the annual contributions of PBS Reno members.

- Hello, I'm Beth Macmillan and welcome to ARTEFFECTS.

In our featured segment, we meet South Lake Tahoe based artisan, Malcolm Tibbetts.

After decades spent honing his woodworking skills, Malcolm has mastered the craft of segmented wood turning.

With it, he turns and shapes wood into head turning 3D mosaics.

(bright music) - My name is Malcolm Tibbetts.

I grew up in northern New Hampshire, and I was blessed by only being a thousand feet away from my granddad.

He had a wood shop in his basement.

He taught me how to pound a nail into wood when I was about four years old, and I've been a worker of wood for over 70 years since then.

You have woodworking where you make things out of lumber, then you have wood turning, and the most common example of that would be to take a chunk of wood and make a salad bowl out of it.

Segmented wood turning is when you take perfectly good boards and cut them all up into little pieces, put them together, and then turn it.

I arrived in Tahoe on the 4th of July 1971, got a job in ski patrol at Heavenly Ski Area.

Met my wife who was the first aid room nurse.

I was a ski patroller starting off.

We bought our first home, had no money left over for furniture, bought a cheap table saw and started making furniture.

It takes a lot of equipment to do segmented work, and because I'd made so much furniture, I had acquired a wood shop full of equipment.

As soon as I knew how to remove wood on a lathe, I started gluing wood back together and shaping things on a lathe.

It's an art form not practiced by a lot of people.

The National Association of Wood Turners, the AAW, it's made up of probably close to 20,000 members.

But within that, there's probably only maybe five or 600 people that pursue segmented wood turning, and there's very, very few that achieve a level of where they can sell their work and so forth.

I'll come up with something in my head and then I'll get out some graph paper and I'll start sketching.

I'll make a rough blueprint.

I'll calculate dimensions and angles.

I keep an inventory of different species of wood, pick and choose my wood, start cutting stuff to accurate dimensions, start gluing things together.

It requires a lot of accurate joinery, a lot of precise angles and gluing techniques.

And of course, you also need to know what you're doing at the lathes.

You can spend a week putting something together.

If you don't know what to do on the lathe, you destroy it all.

Once you've finished turning it, you sand it smooth and you put finish on it and hope somebody likes it.

There's always little surprises when you work with wood.

The grain, the color, you can pick up a hundred pieces of steel and they're all the same.

A few years ago, I started playing with colored wood.

It's wood that goes through a process of stabilization in a vacuum chamber while I take a piece of white maple and turn it purple two inches through.

So now a lot of my work has got unnatural colors, pink and yellow and blue wood.

The biggest enjoyment is the initial designing.

A lot of rough design work happens before I go to sleep at night or before I even get out of bed.

I live, eat and sleep this stuff.

Once I've designed a piece and I start working on it, what drives me is to get to the next piece.

I'm always looking at possibilities, endless possibilities.

It really accurately describes what it is we do as segmented wood turners.

We're uninhibited to make anything we want.

(bright music) My favorite type of work is when I come up with a piece that has a message.

One of my most successful social conscience pieces was a piece called Rocky Road Ahead.

It's a segmented ice cream cone with a globe of ice cream on top of it with the polar caps dripping all over the cone.

My wife and I celebrated our 50th anniversary just a month ago.

To commemorate that, I made her a wood turning, but a special wood turning.

Do you know how many days there are in 50 years of marriage?

There are 18,262 days.

So the wood turning I made has 18,262 pieces.

Nobody's gonna know that except for me and her and now the world.

I learn something from every project I do.

There's no perfect piece.

I was totally self-taught for the first year, made a lot of mistakes where I bit off more than I could chew and I ended up spending several days or more on a project.

What do you do?

You throw it out and start over?

No, you learn something.

Buckminster Fuller is one of my heroes, if you will, and one of his quotes, which I really like, you can never learn less.

Every once in a while you come up with a piece that, yeah, this one works.

There's this one I can get behind.

There's joy in that.

- To learn more about Malcolm Tibbetts, visit tahoeturner.com.

Now it's time for this week's art quiz.

Which ancient civilization is considered the origin of the earliest known wood turners?

Is the answer A, Ancient Etruria, B, Ancient Greece, C, Ancient Egypt, or D, Ancient Mycenae?

And the answer is C, Ancient Egypt.

Alight on Mars is a nocturnal exhibition that celebrates the firefly.

Walking along the outdoor sculpture path, visitors are able to see site-specific artwork that illuminates the night sky.

We head to Gloucester, Massachusetts to find out more.

- [Narrator] This fall, as the days grow shorter and night becomes heavier, a Gloucester estate is lighting the way.

- I just love being here at this moment when it is all about to change.

- [Narrator] Belinda Rathbone is guest curator of this nocturnal exhibition featuring 16 members of the Boston Sculptors Gallery, crafting work that floats, flickers and tantalizes.

- Our idea was to create a kind of journey, shall we say, through the site with surprises around every corner.

- [Narrator] Rathbone is also the author of a new first ever biography on kinetic sculptor, George Rickey, and says these artists have risen to similar challenges.

- He was very challenged about working with outdoor installations, which is what he's best known for.

And these sculptors here today are also making work that is alive in the landscape as light turns to dark.

- [Narrator] The exhibition populates the one-time estate of Paul Manship, perhaps best known for his 1934 sculpture of Prometheus in New York City's Rockefeller Center.

Today, his home, studio and grounds comprise the Manship Artist's Residency, a place for artists to gather, find inspiration, and break out of their routines.

Rebecca Reynolds is the executive director.

- People who come here, they refer to it as a magical place.

And to me, that's just what we'd love to hear because to me that suggests otherworldly or transformation, taking you out of your every day.

- [Narrator] The sculptures here are inspired by Manship's unyielding fondness for fireflies.

So profound that he named his home Starfield for the twinkling, mesmerizing insects that dance around the property still.

- Paul Manship didn't mow his meadow until the end of July because he knew if he did it any sooner, he wouldn't give the fireflies a chance to go through their life cycle.

- Now that life cycle has evolved, both in actual literal fireflies and in their essence.

Here, light captivates because it places the big dipper beneath the sky, as in Jessica Strauss's Drinking Gourd.

Christopher Abrams' piece, Developing Weather, assumes the form of a portable storm while Marilu Swett's sculpture Glow floats.

Now I know this is meant to be seen in the dark, which we will see in about an hour, but what are we seeing here?

- You're seeing a collection of multiple figures that connect with the ocean.

They're in the spiral formation because that's one of the flight patterns for fireflies.

- [Narrator] This has been a show years in the making, giving artists time to craft work, both site specific and leveraging light at its best.

- People started working and doing their research on light, how to incorporate light into their work.

Really only a few of our members had worked with light in their pieces before, so it took some digging.

- [Narrator] But this had already been an area of exploration for Swett, whose work glows with phosphorescent pigment.

- I've come to be interested in, through the research of deep sea creatures, being more and more interested in bioluminescence and finding that it's not just in the ocean, it's many, many, even fireflies, of course, and other insects, but mammals as well, fluoresce.

- [Narrator] Other artists have taken their cues from the property, from sun dappled leaves, a lamp that brightens the home's staircase, and glass fishing floats tucked into a living room basket.

- Many of these artists have studios and they're working every day in their studios, but it's different if you can get out of your every day and go into a place where there are no expectations.

- [Narrator] Not to mention, where you can see the light.

- For more information, visit manshipartists.org.

For our final segment, let's explore where art and science collide.

We're headed to Tulsa, Oklahoma to meet Tyler Thrasher.

Tyler uses scientific principles to create unforgettable works of art.

(bright music) - At some point, people started calling me a wizard, and I think they mean it.

Once you own that, once you're able to back out, whatever, I'm a wizard, people stop questioning it.

You can just do whatever you want.

People are like, well, that's on brand.

I'm Tyler Thrasher.

Describing myself is always a bit of a challenge.

I've kind of summed it up, equal parts artist, equal parts citizen scientist.

I think everything else I do kind of falls under that umbrella.

You'll notice that I have an affinity for weird creatures.

Things that I think traditionally are found to be repulsive or disgusting that I think are incredibly fascinating.

The process of crystallizing something's kind of similar to growing rock candy.

You take a compound molecule and you dissolve it.

So you separate it into its ions and you make a solution.

So you have this like hot water, this sort of soup.

You are just kind of making the environment for this, you know, darn near perfect pattern to form.

I take things like dead insects or skeletons and I just submerge them.

And then as the water evaporates or the vessel cools, these ions come back together and they form that molecule.

From there, it forms this network.

That's what a crystal is.

It's a pattern.

They'll form on anything.

It doesn't matter.

I just happen to have a thing in between all of that and that system, and then they just grow from there.

Nothing dies for my work.

I take insects or specimens that died of natural causes and I crystallize them.

I don't know where to say where I got started, but I guess I can condense it down really quick.

Okay, so let me see if I can do this.

So went to college in Missouri, started caving to fill up my free time, fell in love with caves, fell in love with nature.

I was going to school for computer animation and I realized right before I was about to graduate, I don't want to do this.

So I just filled my weekends with like extracurricular creative projects.

Growing crystals was one of those.

Found a dead bug in the backyard, grew crystals on the dead bug, shared it online, it went viral, and then I made a bunch of crystallized dead bugs, traveled around the country with those bugs, and then that helped fund all the other things I do.

This is Moonbeam Conservatory.

In our shop, we have a little over 13,000 glowing flowers.

So we work with different florists and farmers to get our flora that is dried and preserved, and then we make it glow in the dark.

Almost any color combo you can think of, we have.

When we started making moonbeam flora, I had no intentions of making like the world first glowing flower shop or anything like that.

I just made this glowing flower and I was like this is cool.

I want to share it.

People kept buying them.

This space became available and I don't think we knew what this was gonna be.

It was just we're kind of like, hey, we're gonna try to make this work.

I like to tell people that the Moonbeam Conservatory has three phases.

We get a lot of people in here that just like, they just think it's like a flower shop.

Come on in.

You guys been in before?

- No.

- Are you familiar with the stuff in here?

Okay.

So you're just in time for some pretty cool stuff.

There's the daylight phase where you can see all the colors and the natural textures of the dried flowers.

And then the second phase is what I call the black light phase.

We have these UV flood lights, these black light flood lights installed so we can charge up all the flowers and then I usually let the flowers soak up that energy for a couple of minutes.

A lot of the flowers are fluorescent, which means that they are actively glowing and visually vibrating under the black light.

So I will flip off all the black lights and show the third phase of the store in three, two, one.

- Not-uh.

So how much for everything?

(everyone laughing) - Oh yeah.

What's also really cool is all these little glowing balls on the ceiling.

Those are flower heads, so it's these.

I grew up very isolated.

I also grew up very bullied.

I really didn't have anywhere to fit in.

Now the people that come in the shop, it's like I made a space for people that I think kind of exist on the fringe a little bit.

(mysterious electronic music) I have three assistants.

I have two that make the flowers.

- Working here, you never really know what your day's gonna look like.

It's kind of nice to have a little bit of that chaos.

There's so many colors and we can virtually make anything, so we've made some pigments that I don't think exist anywhere else.

- Chunky.

I couldn't have dreamed this job up, but it is definitely a dream job.

We have to like create contraptions to get the ideal finish on the flower, like our spinning bucket.

- We made this like sort of cardboard, like arena sort of Thunderdome prison thing and we put a potter's wheel in the middle with a five gallon bucket screwed to it.

We can spin all the flowers and kind of choose the spin rate with all the extra paint flings onto the cardboard.

It's definitely a collaborative effort.

We all contributed in a way and so it's really fun to look and go, oh, you know, one person did this, one person did that.

What if you were in a field of that and you weren't moving, but you heard it rustling really fast at you?

Would you just take off running in a random direction?

- If you're tall enough, maybe you can see.

We are so silly and goofy.

There's such an atmosphere of like friendship.

It's so fun to get to brainstorm all our crazy ideas.

- So I've written a couple of books and the last book I wrote, I co-authored with my friend Terry Mudge, and it's called The Universe in 100 Colors.

And we spent a couple of years researching very specific, very niche colors, you know, like Baltic amber, cosmic latte, which is the average color of the observable universe, just all kinds of really fascinating colors, a hundred of them.

- We did rough drafts on every chapter and our editor said they were terrible.

We weren't writers at the time.

My name is Terry Mudge.

I am the founder and scientific director at Stem Cell Science Shop.

It was sort of a store I always wanted to walk into myself.

Our job is to tell the story of everything from a scientific angle.

This is a particle accelerator from the University of Wisconsin.

It was originally called Aladdin, and it would create a very intense magnetic field in the middle, which would guide electrons at extremely high speeds.

So this is a film from NASA.

It's from the '60s and it's actually from the clean room when they were building a satellite.

And so we have the original copy of that film.

Tulsa really is a place where a lot of unpredictable things can happen.

It's just the right size and has just the right spirit.

There's this just really integrated web of people who are just making stuff happen.

I first met Tyler in about 2012-ish, and we've been kind of friends ever since.

So we spent two or three years writing the book.

We originally started with this massive list of colors, and eventually we had to whittle that down.

We went through maybe five or six rounds of editing, polished them up really nice, turned it into a book.

We have very different writing styles, but I think they compliment each other nicely throughout the book.

I think it's really rewarding in that I feel like I'm part of the process of encouraging more people to get interested in science and how things work around them.

(upbeat music) - We do a lot of events at Moonbeam Conservatory.

I didn't know this concept of a third space.

People call it that, people come in and treat it like that.

You know, first space is your home, second space is your work, and third space is somewhere that's detached from both of those, somewhere that contributes to your life, somewhere that fills you up that isn't home or work.

- Tulsa has a really tight-knit community.

There really is no competition.

We all support each other, help one another.

Tyler's got his art studio and said, hey, let's do concerts here and see if people show up.

Each one has pretty much been sold out.

How are y'all feeling?

Ase you ready?

(audience cheering) You know, this is a community event.

Music and art, pulling people together.

I'm just happy to be a part of this community.

(audience applauding) - It's kind of daunting.

When you want something or you have an idea, there's this fear.

What if people hate it?

What if it does not match my expectations?

So what I've learned over and over again is I hope it doesn't meet my expectations.

More often than not, I like what it became more than I originally thought it would be because you don't know, you don't know anything.

You learn along the way.

To me, that's the fun part, is like A to B, everything in between is the good stuff.

(upbeat music) (audience cheering) (audience applauding) (bright music) I get so many people that come through here that are like, I'm glad someone that looks like me is doing this and they're doing it well.

And for me, that gave me a sense of purpose.

We needed more science representation.

We needed more BIPOC artist representation in Oklahoma.

These are the things that fascinate me, and people come in and they share that sentiment, and I don't take that for granted.

Moonbeam Conservatory has three phases.

The second phase is the blacklight phase.

- Oh my goodness.

It's all glowing!

- It feels like I've been trusted with this narrative, this experience, this resource, and it just, I don't know.

It's just kind of kind of humbling.

And it just feels really good.

- This is something like I've never experienced before.

- It's almost like you're transported into a different dimension.

- [Tyler] It was a long journey and probably cut a couple years off of my life, just the stress.

But I am very proud of what we've made and the whole journey to getting here, entirely worth it.

And it's crazy, I think we just got started.

- You can keep up with Tyler by following him on Instagram @tylerthrasherart.

And that wraps it up for this edition of ARTEFFECTS.

If you want to watch new ARTEFFECTS segments early, make sure you subscribe to the PBS Reno YouTube channel.

And don't forget to keep visiting pbsreno.org to watch complete episodes of ARTEFFECTS.

Until next week, I'm Beth Macmillan.

Thanks for watching.

- [Announcer] Funding for ARTEFFECTS is made possible by Sandy Rafealli with Bill Pierce Motors, Heidimarie Rochlin, in memory of Sue McDowell, the Carol Franc Buck Foundation, and by the annual contributions of PBS Reno Members.

(bright music) (upbeat music)