Laura Spector, an artist who coaxed bittersweet vines into alluring and whimsical furniture, lighting and objects, including crowns fit for a druid, before Lyme disease curtailed her practice, died on July 25 at her home in Fairfield, Conn. She was 71.
Her husband, Mark Spector, announced her death but did not provide a cause.
Asian bittersweet is a much-loathed invasive species that was brought to the United States from Japan as an ornamental plant in the 19th century. Ever since, it has run riot along the Eastern Seaboard, choking everything it can wrap its lethal tendrils around.
The vine, which can kill a tree in as little as three years, is an obnoxious menace and a scourge to gardeners and arborists. To Ms. Spector, it was an irresistible medium.
Throughout the nature preserves, forests and backyards of Connecticut, she hurled her tiny dancer’s frame into the tangled brush, harvesting her chosen crop with a pole saw. A local land trust and the water company gave her permission to hack through their woods. They were happy, she told The New York Times in 2008, to have her pruning services, as long as she indemnified them in case of injury. (As it happened, she never fell, and the only limbs she severed were the creepers.)
Once the vines were harvested, she piled them into her truck, unloading them on her driveway, where they would remain until inspiration struck. The whorls and snarls dictated the kinds of objects she might create. She would use her entire body to bend the material into rustic benches, arches, beds, tables and mirrors, anchoring the pieces with a nail gun. (She shot herself only a few times, in the hand.)
Her work recalls the romantic rustic furniture of 18th-century English gardens — benches, nooks and arches that look as if they sprouted from the landscape or were made by fairies — but when Ms. Spector began, she was self-taught and worked intuitively.
“She had the stamina to get right in there and wrestle the vines,” Daniel Mack, an author and rustic furniture artist whose workshops Ms. Spector attended, said in an interview. “She had a kind of bravery that was a model for the rest of us. It was almost like theater. She was secure with a nail gun.”
The practice of making rustic furniture “attracts outliers and misbehavers,” Mr. Mack added. “It’s not logical stuff. It’s fantasy furniture, props for different story lines.”
Ms. Spector had trained as a dancer and worked in the music business and as a marketing consultant before she began her art practice, which she described as “a conversation between a person and nature,” in an interview with The Westport News in 1999.
She made pieces for designers and musicians like Joan Baez and Sting, and created installations for botanical gardens, hotels and department stores, including Macy’s. For a client in Pound Ridge, N.Y., she created a 30-foot winding staircase.
For Barbara Israel, the proprietor of a garden-antiques business in Katonah, N.Y., she made a fantastical arch of twisted vines fitted out with two benches. Over the last quarter of a century, it has slowly decayed, and now only the metal armature remains.
But no matter, Ms. Israel said: “When an artwork disappears, it becomes more special.”
Laura Fay Reitman was born on July 28, 1954, in New Hyde Park, N.Y., on Long Island, the middle of three sisters. Her mother, Georgette (Lieberman) Reitman, was a Holocaust survivor who arrived in the United States speaking only French; she became a nurse and then, after earning a degree, a professor of comparative literature at Hofstra University in Nassau County. Her father, Morton Reitman, was a textile executive.
Laura grew up in Merrick, also on Long Island, and studied dance at Bennington College and New York University.
She met Mr. Spector in the mid-1980s, when both were working in the music industry. He manages artists like Ms. Baez, Suzanne Vega and Graham Nash; she worked in marketing and video. They married in 1987.
In addition to her husband, Ms. Spector is survived by their son, Nicholas, and daughter, Jordan Spector Buchla; a grandchild; her sisters, Lisa Reitman Dobi and Judith Texier; and her mother.
The choicest vines, Ms. Spector said of her medium, were those that grew deep in the forest. She made sure to stand on the toughest, largest vines while wielding her pole saw overhead. With her dancer’s sense of balance, she never wiped out. Poison ivy was an issue, however, and twice she climbed into a beehive by mistake.
“I had to strip naked out there because they were stuck in my clothes,” she told The Times in 2008, referring to the bees. “You can’t imagine the pain.”
Her real adversaries, though, were ticks. Ms. Spector contracted Lyme disease two decades ago and suffered frequent, powerful recurrences that sapped her strength.
Eventually, she gave up her furniture practice and began making photoshop collages, 8-by-10-inch pieces in what she described as her Identity Series, featuring characters that she called Laura dolls, stylized stand-ins for her that looked like paper dolls with a distinctive mop of red hair. She deployed them in different settings — armed with, variously, a snowblower, a chain saw, an umbrella, a pickleball paddle or a vacuum cleaner. In one piece, she floated a Laura doll above a highway at night; in another, Laura dolls hung in the air like Magritte’s bowler-hatted men.
“My reliance on imagination to construct identity was very much tied to my collaboration with nature,” she wrote in an artist’s statement on her website. “If an individual is informed by purpose and occupation, then I had retreated to a place of uncertainty and disenfranchised grief.”
The Laura dolls were a way to experience the world through play, she said, and “also a reminder that we are all in some way addressing universal feelings of isolation as we search for connection.”
