One Step at a Time

Candyce J. Garrett of Galisteo, New Mexico is a noted stone carver with artworks in private collections and galleries throughout the United States. Her sculpture, “One Step at a Time”, is 5’10” tall, 22” in width and 22” in depth, and includes two vertical columns sculpted from Texas pink granite, intricately supported by rungs of African black granite, depicting a strong ladder which reaches toward the sky. Her sculpture was initially installed in Dublin’s Coffman Park in 2007 as part of the original Titration series. It is now installed in Washington Township’s Ted Kaltenbach Park.

She has served on the faculty for a number of stone carvers’ symposiums and has studios in both New Mexico and Texas. Garrett, who apprenticed with renowned sculptor Jesus Moroles, has created an artwork at the San Antonio Spurs workout facility as well as a granite fountain for the Santa Fe Farmers Market Railyard Center among other notable projects. She also collaborated on a granite sculpture to commemorate the 10th anniversary of V-Day, a global movement to stop violence against women and girls.

She says of her work, “My love affair with granite is parallel to my love for life. It is a privilege to experience and celebrate the journey that pushes us to new limits to reach the majestic beauty of the finished creation.”

Dublin Arts Council chose the exhibition title Titration to reflect the addition of a new concentration of sculpture into the community’s midst. Titration is a common laboratory method used to add a measured quantity of a reagent, called a titrant, into an unknown reagent, called a reactant, to produce a chemical reaction.

The individual artworks reflect a metaphor of the exhibition’s name. Much as titrant is added to a reactant drop by drop, this exhibition was intended to change our community’s environment, artwork by artwork, as an endpoint of cultural identity is realized.

The Titration exhibition was curated as part of Ripple Effect: Artistic Impact of the Scioto River, a new project of Dublin Arts Council designed to offer ongoing and unique opportunities for visual, performing and interpretive art projects associated with multi-level investigation of the Scioto River.

Titration involves fluid properties in the figurative sense: our changing community, Dublin’s growing collection of public art and Dublin’s sense of cultural identity. In the literal, the exhibition dovetailed with the introduction of Riverboxes, another public art initiative that encourages historical and artistic exploration and response to the river in our midst.