Profile of a sculptor:
Marjolaine Renfro

by Dana DuGan

The condensed version is this: Marjolaine Renfro—wife, mother, clay artist, sculptor—ended up in the United States thanks to a contraband Reader’s Digest. 

Shortly after World War II, her Dutch father read in the Digest that a person could own his own car in the U.S. That was enough impetus for this sometime-painter, who’d been in a concentration camp during the war, to spend five years saving money so he could take his French wife and their children to Long Island, N.Y. 

The family’s first American holiday was Halloween.
The children dressed up in costumes, and people gave them candy and oranges. She learned her first English words that night. “Trick or treat,” she said with a laugh. 

The next night, she and her sister donned costumes again, expecting that every night in America would be like that.

“We thought we’d died and gone to heaven,” she said. “It’s still my favorite holiday.”

Eventually the family moved to Hollywood and then to Laguna Beach, Calif., a place they settled in because it reminded them of the South of France. 

“There was an artistic flair in everything we did,” said Renfro, describing their lives in Laguna Beach.

“My mom could do anything with a needle and thread.”

Putting off her dream of going to the Oakland School of Arts and Crafts and becoming an artist, Renfro married her husband Robert, a local Realtor, moved to Idaho and raised two children.

But when her daughters were off in college in 1992, Renfro made her move.

The journey started with a soul-searching trip to the Monastery of the Ascension at the Jerome Priory. For five days she had only pencils and paper for company. She wanted simply to be safe and to be fed while she considered her art.

“Is this a pipe dream or is this real?” she wondered.
It seemed real enough to Renfro, who subsequently traveled to the West Coast in search of a college where she could continue her studies. Although Oakland and the school she had forgone 20 years earlier were her destination, in Portland at the Oregon College of Arts and Crafts she realized, “Oh my God, I’m home.” 

In one day, she enrolled, found a room to rent and began a new life. And in one intensive year, she completed three years of study. 

Intending to pursue metal smithing, she made another discovery: ceramics. 

Clay artist Jim Koudelka, with whom Renfro remains close, ran the ceramics department at the college and mentored her. Renfro, who had never had a room to herself or “made a meal when someone else wasn’t there,” found the atmosphere and the freedom inspiring. Without the distractions of family life, she was free to work seven days a week, often more than 12 hours a day. 

Renfro returned to Sun Valley and immediately set up a studio in her home in Ketchum.

A member of her arts community contacts in Portland encouraged Renfro to “make stuff” to exhibit at her gallery show.

Opportunities arose that stretched her imagination and abilities. For instance, several years ago she was asked by local artist Michael Zapponi to make a ceramic goddess for his fireplace niche. 

“It was the hardest thing I had ever done, because it was curvaceous and wasn’t linear.”

What emerged was “Anima Mundi,” her first truly curvilinear piece. When she delivered the piece, Zapponi recommended she do it in bronze and mentored her through the process. Renfro initially made a limited edition series of 20 in bronze, her first in that element. 

She also collaborated with Zapponi on a large colorful piece in the Courtyard in Ketchum. Bepe Dolsot, who developed the Courtyard, commissioned the mostly stainless steel, steel and cast aluminum piece titled “Tout Sauf l’Évier,” which in English loosely means “everything but the kitchen sink.”

Renfro has always been drawn to architecture, and in her art this predilection is obvious. For several years she made intricate clay boxes, ceramic puzzles of a sort with names like “I was concealed” and “I live beyond interpretation.”

These pieces had nooks and crannies, drawers and doorways where more secrets were revealed. She admits they were rather dark and that her work “doesn’t sell well at art shows.” People told her that the work took them “places they didn’t want to go.” 
It’s hard to imagine anyone not willingly following the conundrums set forth in these pieces. They’re inviting and oblique at the same time.

Fortunately a few galleries took a chance and have remained steadfast to her creativity and evolution as an artist. 

Renfro’s work has become more soulful and more spiritual since the late 1990s.

“There is more joy now,” she admitted. “I had to step back and say, ‘Do I do it for money, or do I do it for me?’” 

Me won.

“I don’t want to be limited because I own a kiln.” 

This year she applied for and was awarded a grant from the Idaho Commission for the Arts to use electricity, light and glass in her work.

“I’m clueless, but that doesn’t stop me.”

In one of her more recent pieces, she co-opted an e e cummings line, “I carry your heart I carry it in my heart.” The stenciled letters are cut out of copper and strung between pieces of the sculpture.

“I like interactive art. I want things to happen when people walk by my art.” She is currently looking at ways to incorporate sound-activated mechanisms. 

She may be, in her words, clueless, but her intense drive to create leads her continually forward. One of her favorite works incorporates the saying, “My barn having burned to the ground I can now see the moon.”

Renfro is an artist who recognizes the yin and yang in life and incorporates both into her work. Her art is neither totally whimsical nor completely solemn, but always thought provoking. •