News and Opinion from Sisters, Oregon
News and Opinion from Sisters, Oregon
Deggendorfer’s tiles depict the landscape of rural Central Oregon, making cancer center patients feel close to their home.
Anita Maze and Kathy Deggendorfer spent seven weeks painstakingly glazing tiles.
Atmosphere and setting was an important consideration in the design of the new St. Charles Cancer Center in Bend, slated to open later this month. Modern treatment centers eschew the institutional feeling for a more welcoming and tranquil setting for patients who are going through the most fraught and traumatic experience of their lives.
Those patients and their families will be welcomed to the cancer center by a beautiful depiction of their own home country in a 26-foot-wide painted tile triptych created by Sisters artist Kathy Deggendorfer, in partnership with Anita Maze and Suzanne Redfield of Kibak Tile in Redmond.
The installation consists of 72 foot-square tiles that together create a mural depicting an interpretation of the Central Oregon skyline along with rolling farmlands, all rendered in Deggendorfer's signature style.
"They really want people to stay near home for their treatment," Deggendorfer said. "It needed to be a piece that felt like home."
Getting Deggendorfer's design and style transferred onto tile was a challenging process. Maze, a Kibak Tile glazer, worked for a month to develop the colored glazes to translate Deggendorfer's vision, then the pair spent seven weeks in Deggendorfer's studio space at Sisters Art Works, painstakingly glazing the tiles.
"You think of it as paint, but it's not paint," Deggendorfer said of working with this challenging medium. "It's powdered glass. It would be impossible to do that project without people with the experience and expertise of Anita and Suzanne."
The work was challenging in a number of respects. All too often, a carefully glazed tile would break while being fired, and the artists would have to do it all again. And the process is more analytical than the intuitive painter is used to.
"You learn a lot about yourself and your process," Deggendorfer acknowledged. "What I found was I typically think a lot at the beginning (then) have a wonderful time with my paints and then leave it. I very rarely look back at a piece and analyze it."
Her tile project required analyzing each step of each phase, repeatedly.
Along the way, the artist consulted with someone who is living the experience the artwork is aimed to ameliorate: Sisters Folk Festival Development Director Katy Yoder.
"It was great to have her to bounce ideas off of," Degggendorfer said.
The St. Charles Cancer Center is slated to open this month, with a grand opening in August, when the Sisters public will have a chance to view the painstaking work of one of their own.
Jim Cornelius is editor in chief of The Nugget and author of “Warriors of the Wildlands: True Tales of the Frontier Partisans.” A history buff, he explores frontier history across three centuries and several continents on his podcast, The Frontier Partisans. For more information visit www.frontierpartisans.com.
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