Picture this: a mugshot of an elderly lady, a half-smirk painted on her face, holding a drill raised at the sky and cocked by her head—as if it were a handgun. This is how I was first introduced to sculptor Margaret Conte. She’s been transforming other people’s trash into treasures before it was cool. Prior to even seeing her artwork, I knew I had to meet this wild woman.
Conte’s makes her sculptures of an interesting assortment of upcycled materials, but she gravitates to using wood as her base elements. Table legs, miniature doll chairs, metal wire, nails, photographs, jewelry, cat figurines, beads, a Megalodon tooth — these are just a few of her favorite things. Or things you might see in her sculptures, anyways. Her mixed-media statues are inspired by a word, phrase, or song (she’s a 70s gal, who still digs Garfunkel and Dylan), where she transforms from language into the realms of the visual and tangible. For her, it’s all about the process of building the piece.
The garage door rises as I pull up to her home in Brandon, reveling her Woman Cave: a two-car, spacious studio filled with power tools, long work tables, and drawers full of odds and ends.
“Sometimes you can’t see the table through all of the sawdust,” the light-purple-haired Conte teases about the workspace she shares with her videographer daughter, Cathey Conte.
Because of the slow accumulation of art materials over time through scavenging garage sales or receiving donations from people who know her work, she explains, “As you can see I really don’t need to keep finding materials now. See, I’ll tell you what happens is, you go to a yard sale and you buy something. You bring it home, and it’s just so cool. Then you put it somewhere, and when you need something you can’t find it, so you go get something else because you can’t find what you need!”
Building these sculptures seems similar to making a stew: Add a bit of this, leftovers from that, so that you’re never able to really replicate the same recipe twice. No matter what though, she always starts with the base.
“I knew you were going to ask about my feet, because everybody asks about my feet. As you can see, they’re standing up, and you can’t stand up without feet.” She works from the bottom to the top, by attaching legs to the feet, maybe a wine box for the “body,” then lastly adding the top (usually heads, which typically have auras around them). As a true testament to the tangibility of these dimensional objects, Conte tells us to touch away.
“Whenever my work is shown under a glass case, I don’t know why but that just bothers the living daylights out of me. It seems like the work is not accessible, and I like it if people want to touch these,” she says.
As we chat on the couch in her living room about her inspirations, she pulls a little notebook from a drawer.
“When I think of something, I write it down,” she says of her little book of thoughts. Some are silly, others more introspective, but all are fleeting. She reads them aloud to me:
“Green-eyed lady.”
“A white shade of pale.”
“There never seems to be enough time to do the things you want to do once you find them.”
“And the night wind stirs with her breath.”
“There’s no normal life, just life.”
“I’ll be around if you wait for me.”
“Everything new is old again.”
“Lo and behold.”
“What ever happened to whitewall tires?”
All of her pieces have separate stories (hence her body of work, Story Boxes) in their own little rooms, and the titles allow the viewer to decide where that story to go, almost acting as a little nudge to get us in the right direction of where the artist’s thoughts are.
Creating has always been a part of this Florida native’s life, ever since her childhood days of sitting on the front porch in the little town of Graham with her Carmen Miranda coloring books. Fast-forward years later (after-kids-gone-through-college later), Conte decided she would go back to school. Strangely enough, getting into art really just started out with her wanting to take a typing class at Hillsborough Community College.
“After the first few classes I just knew I couldn’t keep doing it," she says. "It was just awful. It was during add/drop week, so I switched to a drawing class with Jerry Meatyard.”
From there, she took his sculpture and ceramics classes.
“When I first started ceramics, I couldn’t believe it; it was so wonderful. I just loved it. I couldn’t wait to get up in the morning to work on it,” Conte says. “I did try wheel-throwing, but it didn’t work for me. It was like somebody else was making that pot — I wasn’t. It also bothered me that they all looked alike, even though you could distort them afterwards, they all just seemed to look like, ‘So yeah, here’s a pot.’” (Ouch! A tough blow to this wheel-thrower.)
As a hand-builder for some 30 years, raku firings were her go-to (you know you’re a champ when you do raku three days in a row; no mask or anything, because she’s a purist like that).
“But it was strange, one day I just woke up and I didn’t want to do it anymore,” she tells me with a hint of sadness in her voice.
Despite no longer feeling the pull to ceramics, she did have some experience in wood working since her husband was a wood worker. He helped her learn how to drill a hole, and put dowels in the necks of her lady statues. “If I ever had a really big piece I was working on, he would help me cut it on his table saw. The pieces are getting smaller though, because I’m doing it myself now. It’s not that easy anymore.”
As an artist, continuously testing ideas and ruining projects is the only way to learn. I asked Conte if she learned most of her techniques from her husband, and she laughed as she said, “Well, not the first one! The first one I made, I had put together with hot glue. I had sold it to a lady in Arkansas, so I mailed it to her. It arrived at her doorstep in parts, but the good news was her husband was handy so he put it back together. It’s not that it was hard to put back together, but I was just so embarrassed! From that lesson, I learned that I needed to dowel the parts together with the correct glue. My husband never did that part for me, but he did provide me with the knowledge to do it myself.”
It’s true that diamonds are a girl’s best friend—diamond drill bits, that is. “I think for my 77th birthday I got a drill press. I think I’ve got to be the only woman in the world who got a drill press for her birthday. My husband was very supportive of my work, and very proud of the fact that I was woodworking. I guess, to him that was seen as more of a male thing.” Move aside, fellas, she’s got this.
Categorizing Conte’s work is a bit sticky. There is a folk art style that runs through her work, especially with her beaming sense of telling a good story. Yet, the “naïve” quality of folk art and the distinction of it being purely aesthetic seem to discount the thought that goes into her work. It’s pretty clear she knows what she’s doing, and has extensive training and years of experience to prove it.
Don’t even bring up “Outsider Art.” (I mean, what better way to alienate an artist further by declaring them to be outside of the art party? That’s just plain rude.) Instead, I asked the artist how she viewed her art:
“These are just me. Yeah, I look at other artists’ work, but I think my type of artwork falls into a gap between primitive and contemporary. It doesn’t have a home, I don’t think, but it seems to lean towards the primitive because it’s not really refined-looking. It’s more eclectic.”
When asked if there was anything else she wanted Tampa to know, her quick, witty, matter-of-fact response was, “Yeah, I’m here. Call and make an appointment,” with a little smile on her face.
To see more of Margaret Conte’s work or contact her for a visit, check out: margaretconte.com.
Urban Dictionary defines Femme Fatale as “a woman with both intelligence and sex appeal that uses these skills to manipulate poor helpless men into doing what she wants. May cause death.” Keeping in line with this concept, the women highlighted in Caitlin Albritton's "Femme Visuale" series aims to highlight local women artists and show off some lesser-known talent that's been hiding in the shadows. In the art world, if it ain't big and loud, it ain't being seen (looking at you, Koons). Art as a grand spectacle leaves little room for modest, sincere, or quiet voices, especially women's voices. And I promise, we won’t bite.
This article appears in Feb 4-10, 2016.