Pat Badani uses bread bowls in her art.

Badani, a media interactive installation artist and professor at Illinois State University, spoke about her unique art materials Thursday night at the Tarble Art Center.

Badani worked at a bakery in Paris before she moved to the U.S. She used actual bread bowls and foam to create pieces of art.

For Badani, these pieces of art were more then just bread and foam. They were a metaphor.

Glen Hild, chair of the art department, found the art to be creative.

“The bread bowls were the most interesting,” Hild said.

Badani said the bread bowls “show how carving a space happens when an immigrant comes to a country.”

These bread bowls were just the beginning.

Much of Badani’s work is done online.

She has a Web site with videos of people from different countries being interviewed about their lives.

Badani said she likes to engage people in her work.

She has collected 130 video clips and uses 55 on her online site.

“Ideal Place” is an example of a work with many different people and views.

“People were able to post ideas of what made them feel at home,” Badani said.

There was many ways people could do this, including a wall where people wrote what an ideal world meant to them.

Badani also used art for her storytelling.

“Storytelling is something I’m trying to get away from. In storytelling, there is a beginning and an end,” Badani said.

She used this idea with a piece called [8 – bits], an eight minute video with her father, who recently passed away.

Kit Morice, curator of Education at the Tarble Arts Center, appreciated Badani’s artistic presentation

“It’s great to hear an artist in their own words and working methods,” Morice said.

Pat Badani, talks about her ideas and inspirations of her art at “In Time Time” lecture at the Tarble Art Center, Thursday night. (Karla Browning/The Daily Eastern News)

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