Besides her many public art and landscape projects, Betsy Schulz has always experimented with new ideas and new mediums in her studio art, using oil, acrylic, encaustic, and enamelized copper. Recently she has created “Bottles Up” and “Bottle Fragments,” made form a collection of antique bottles molded in clay. The original bottles used for the molds were found in garage sales, landfills, wells, and backyard dumps; many are over 100 years old. Their origin has influenced Schulz’s combination of thin clay fragments, reminiscent of peeling wallpaper and debris, with the clay bottles. Says Schulz, “The bottles in their clay-fragment boxes represent all the many elixirs we have taken over the years, and may still have in our medicine cabinet today.”
