When Jim Neel ’71 started working on his upcoming show, he knew it would incorporate the themes that have driven his art in recent years: the experience of children living in war, the trauma inflicted by violence, and his own observations from visits to unstable areas, especially the month he spent on the border zone between Turkey and Syria in 2014.

He didn’t expect it to also turn into an excavation of his own family history. But when his mother died last fall, he found a collection of his childhood toys and shoes, as well as a doll his grandmother had owned as a young girl in the early 1900s. Suddenly, the work got a lot more personal.

“Things change and ideas evolve,” said Neel, who is associate professor of art at BSC, where Concomitant will be on display in the Durbin Gallery beginning Sept. 30. “I decided that rather than making this about toys I had no contact with, I would use the archaeology of my own childhood.”

Those relics have been magnified in scale: ceramic baby dolls as big as the children who might have played with them, some 300 replicas of his own infant shoes, and giant doll heads whose size belies the delicate porcelain from which they’re cast.

The pieces were only possible because Neel was selected to take part this winter in the John Michael Kohler Arts Center’s world-renowned Arts/Industry residency program, which allows artists to work in the factory studios of the Kohler Co., in Kohler, Wis. For about four months, Neel had access to the enormous kilns and special materials used to make Kohler’s sinks, tubs, and toilets–as well as help from the company’s industrial designers in making molds and more. (Watch a video of Neel at Kohler and catch a glimpse of the new works at www.facebook.com/jimneelartist.) 

It was Neel’s second residency there; the first time, he cast the ceramic simian soldiers that made up the basis of a previous well-received exhibition called Babel and earned him the nickname “Monkey Man” from Kohler employees.

“It’s just this great opportunity,” Neel said. “There are things I could do there—and it was still a struggle in some cases—that would be impossible in a normal studio. And the assistance from everyone from the product developers to the guys on the floor is amazing.”

The work has drawn in the next generation as well. Neel’s wife, Lynn—a glass artist—is collaborating with him on a piece; his daughter, Breane Arnold Trest (husband John Trest is a 1996 BSC grad) is sewing doll dresses and bodies; and his son, Colin Neel, a first-year student at BSC, is composing an electronic soundscape for the exhibit. Both Lynn and Colin visited Kohler during his residency to assist. Neel also received assistance from BSC senior Brooke Akins, who cast metal pieces at Birmingham’s Sloss Furnaces that will be incorporated into the exhibit.

All those components will make Concomitant a powerful exploration of not just the tragedy in Syria, but also how violence impacts children—and all of us—from the Sandy Hook massacre to natural disasters that end with tiny bodies being pulled from rubble.

“Somebody’s got to tell the story,” Neel said. “That’s what I have to do, and I’m a visual guy, a visual artist—I’m going to tell the story through visual means.”