Michael Porten was sleeping on a piece of foam in a parking garage in Savannah, Georgia, when Trish Andersen invited him to sleep in the room of a local hotel she shared with her ex-boyfriend.
Mr. Porten, from Savannah, had no luck, he was just a little maniacal about the proximity of his field of work to the Savannah College of Art and Design. In March 2014, he and Mrs. Andersen, both artists, had been commissioned by SCAD to create a near-campus microhouse no larger than a parking lot for a project called SCADpad, which focused on the future of the design of urban housing.
Nor is it certain that the partnership benefited from the fact that Mr Porter slept with a good roof over his head during the three days that he and Ms Andersen worked as partners. But a year later, the two discovered whether they could be more than an artistic match as they swam in their underwear in a medieval town in the south of France.
Mrs. Andersen, 38, is a fiber artist and the founder of a fine arts and home textiles studio. When she met Mr. Porten, she was living in Brooklyn, where she moved after graduating from SCAD in 2005 with a textile degree.
A painter and sculptor, Mr Porten, 39, also graduated from SCAD, first with a bachelor’s degree in illustration in 2004 and then, in 2010, with an MFA in painting.
However, the two hadn’t crossed paths before SCADpad. Their combination for it came from their shared love for unusual patterns and colors, said Amy Zurcher, the project’s organizer and a long-time friend of both. Less apparent to Ms. Zurcher was their mutual fierceness about meeting deadlines. When Mrs. Andersen arrived in Savannah, Mr. Porten was walking on fumes.
“Michael was in rags,” Mrs. Andersen said, working around the clock and sleeping in the parking garage. She respected his work ethic. “I work myself to the limits of physical pain when I have to,” she said, “and I appreciate people who do that too.”
Aside from their triumph over meeting the project deadline, they were both too tired to make any promises about keeping in touch. By the time new solo art projects each brought to Lacoste, France, in the summer of 2015, Ms. Andersen felt compelled to ask Mr. Porten if he remembered her. He did, and this time they made an effort to get to know each other better.
Ms Andersen traces her interest in fiber art to her childhood in Dalton, Georgia, which is home to hundreds of carpet plants and is often referred to as “the carpet capital of the world,” she said. The city, where she grew up with two sisters and a brother, stimulated her creativity. So did her parents, Robb and Ellen Andersen.
Mr. Porten grew up in Madison, Ala., with his mother, Frances Porten, and an older sister. When he was 1, his parents divorced; his father, Nicholas Porten, and four other siblings remained in his hometown of Indianapolis. His entrance into the art world was an evolution. “Math was more my forte in school,” he said, adding, “I feel like sometimes the world thinks about what it wants to do to you, and you eventually do.”
He traveled to France in May 2015 to paint a mural in Lacoste, commissioned by SCAD, and for a solo exhibition of his work at a local gallery. Ms. Andersen, who reconnected with him after arriving there in June, was in Lacoste for an alumni artist residency that SCAD was offering. Her plan was to make several huts, similar to the medieval huts that can be found all over the landscape, but from cloth-wrapped rope. Fate struck when miles of her rope got stuck in customs. By the time it arrived, she was desperate for help to pack it up and get it ready.
“All these people had to jump in and help me,” she said. Mr. Porten was one of those people.
When they didn’t wrap rope in daring fabric, “we discovered secrets in ancient ruins, listened to the echo of an ocean of bees in a valley of lavender, and watched the sunset on a mountain to the sound of goat bells,” she said. . They also swam in their underwear and drank a lot of wine.
But when what she calls their summer of love ended that August, she returned to Brooklyn and he to Savannah, again without making any promises to each other. But this time she had wanted one.
“I was thinking, he’s my guy, and we’re going to go back to the United States and be a couple,” Ms Andersen said. Instead, Mr. Porten started dating someone else shortly after he got home. She found out during a work trip to Savannah in the fall of 2015.
“I remember my mom coming to meet me, and I was just roaring and crying in our hotel room,” she said. “I went back to New York. I’m done with him.”
But soon, Mr. Porten’s new relationship began to unravel. Not too resentful to sympathize, she talked him over the phone by untangling herself.
A year later, after they each made several trips to each other’s towns for visits, Mr. Porten was ready to call her his girlfriend. “She was ahead of me on emotional attachment,” he said. “I caught up.”
Until 2018, they lived up to a long-distance relationship. But Mrs. Andersen’s bond with New York loosened. “I was ready not to be there all the time,” she said. She also wanted to delve into the fine arts side of her career, and Savannah seemed like a better place for that. Mr. Porten was there to help her master the operation of a tufting gun, the tool she uses to create much of her fiber art.
That fall, she gave up her Brooklyn apartment and moved into a Savannah house with Mr. Porten (the set was featured in Architectural Digest in October). It hadn’t been an easy decision. “I didn’t want to put all my eggs in one basket,” Ms Andersen said. “If it didn’t work out, I didn’t want to screw myself so I couldn’t go back to New York.”
And Mrs. Andersen didn’t move until she protected herself. By the middle of 2018, “I said to Michael, ‘Are we getting married? Do you want kids? Because if you don’t want kids, I’m out,'” she said.
Mr. Porten decided he wanted those things and told her, much to her relief, without much hesitation.
The following year, at a vacation home in Edisto Beach, SC, where Mrs. Andersen’s family was spending the holidays, on Christmas Day he proposed and handed her a paper engagement ring that he had secretly made by their artist friend Libby. Newell.
Mrs. Andersen’s mother cried happy tears. Her own reaction was less traditional: taken aback, she called him the profanity of a jerk. “He really got me, you know?” she said. “All the way to South Carolina I thought, ‘I’m-going-have-to-leave-him-if-he-don’t-propose-but-I-can’t-because-I-love him’ kind of thing.”
The wedding they had planned for October 2020 at SCAD was sidelined by the pandemic. That was okay, Ms Andersen said, because “my mind couldn’t handle planning a wedding with everything that was going on.” At the wedding that took place a year later, on November 6 in SCAD, the bride wore wellies. And not as a display of artistic whimsy.
On November 5, a storm devastated Savannah, flooding the site where they planned their ceremony, Habersham Hall. With the help of their friends Paula and Glenn Wallace, SCAD’s president and chief operating officer, they regrouped in Poetter Hall, another campus building.
The rain was still falling when Mrs. Andersen, Robb Andersen, a Universal Life Church pastor ordained for the event, declared them married in front of 180 guests, most of them vaccinated and some soaked.
The downpour, both reflected, was arguably the best part of their wedding.
“Our friends are all artists and creatives, and when they saw the chaos that we were dealing with hurricane-level winds and all this water, they turned themselves into an army,” said Ms Andersen, adding that most of the their wedding decor was salvaged, except for “the 6-foot windsock dancers made to resemble us.”
“They were too wet to dance,” she added.
Mr. Porten, armed with a five-gallon bucket to scoop up water, helped friends set up a tent outside Habersham Hall for the reception. He was no stranger to ambitious projects, but none had ever made him feel fuller.
“To see my friends out there scurrying and solving problems was the next level,” he said. “Magic happened that day.”
On this day
When Nov 6, 2021
True Savannah College of Art and Design, Savannah, Georgia.
Sparks Ms Zurcher, who paired Ms Andersen and Mr Porten for their microhouse project, said she deliberately played “a bit of a pushy role” in their professional relationship: “Both of them have creative sparks that just fly. were on a parallel path.”
Down the artistic rabbit hole In keeping with their aesthetic sensibilities, the wedding decor featured handcrafted whimsical elements, including a giant paper cat on wheels that their flower girl, Oslin King, rode. “I wanted it to have Alice in Wonderland accents,” said Ms. Andersen, who wore a celery green dress made by her friend Anna McCraney for the ceremony, then a more colorful outfit for the reception. “My inspiration was a kind of crazy school performance. I wanted everything to look handmade and messy.”
Magic Feet Mr. Porten’s wedding shoes were Stan Smiths with yellow and red dots, described by Mrs. Andersen as his signature. “I once did a show that was inspired by the inherent optimism you can get out of clothes,” he said. “If you wear something floral on your feet, if you look down, it’s not that serious. It’s powerful.”