image for catalogue

meeting with Jill - March 5, 2011

Jill and I had another really essential-for-me meeting. I had kind of gotten caught in a spot of thinking that I'd found a new territory but then not knowing what to do with it. I think when Jill walked in and first looked at the material, that she might have been struggling to see why I found the new work so compelling - we talked about my early eye sight and how this work may be related. But even before she came in I had begun to notice how "frontal" it all was - and was looking at the architect Steve Soll's work- where he wraps openings around the sides of buildings. However, that was not where the discussion really started. It started with 2 ideas and went from there :

1. how to think about my work - that it is an evolution, work that arises out of work that arises out of work - rather than a progression from not-so-good to better to better..... - that it may read differently to me (and others) at different times.

2. The other was the lighting. I was showing her the work with lights that I use - she noticed that it affected the color and that it was unlikely that a studio would have lights that gave me that same effect. We tried turning off all the lights - that was very dull. Jill than mentioned the artist David Ireland, who incorporated his lighting into the art - which I told her that you, Deb, had recommended to me last summer. I had then spent a lot of time chasing lighting and... that was a journey that I guess is still unresolved since I'm continuing to rely on unreliable external sources, or sources that may not be the same from place to place.

3. We talked about how to edit/ think of my work: is it many small pieces, or is it works comprised of small pieces ?

The top is obviously one piece.

But then she had me edit my wall with many of my newer pieces. In the end, the wall looked like the middle image: (sorry that the camera isn't better - it has a very tactile feel to it - the effervescent works juxtaposed with the solid pieces)

4. Which led to a discussion of background: wall/ paper/ or wallpaper
a. the wall, as in the middle piece
b. that the top piece could be beautifully mounted on nice thick hot press paper, and that I could actually use paper from the get-go as a background for new works( which is something I have done in years past and loved it - especially heavy duty hot press)
c. that I could use a large piece of cloth as "wallpaper" and attach smaller pieces. To demonstrate this we rearranged another wall and the larger cloth is serving as the wall paper, which, of course, could cover the whole area if desired - see bottom image
( I am including the floor in the photo so you can have a sense of proportion) (also, the dark works are actually dark purple and blue).

5. That my work is mostly there - what I'm dealing with is details:
a. is sewing better than pins or gluing?
b. do I want any larger gestures? which I added with the overhanging blue organza in the middle piece
c. we never wound back around to lighting, but that is still - and always- a question for me.

new stuff

Simple, Unaffected. Just happened to land there.
Ordered from China, traditional Japanese dyeing method, French Sennelier dyes, steam fixed, ironed, sewn, burned, draped, cut,
hung … just so.
just so.

Discovered: dyeing for love of color, ripping (v. cutting) for integrity of cloth, burning for introduction of chance, hanging to get a glimpse possibility

First meeting with Jill

I just had the most amazing meeting with Jill. She was very positive and pointed me in the direction of Tuttle - that my work is very intuitive and it is strongest when I am really "with" the work - as soon as I get mechanical she could read that and it made the work less present for her. She said not to worry about presentation at this point but to make a couple of pieces between now and maybe 2 weeks from now - quickly - and then have her come back with the questions fresh. She thought I might want to set up "quicktime" to show the gorgeous light coming through my work during the day, but the flashlights at night idea: not so great ( in terms of light, no question she is right with that). She was here for a long time and kept falling in love with all the "incidental" pieces I have around - my color charts, where/how I had draped material on a structure I was not seeing as a piece - which, when she pointed it out - I loved it that way, too. Really, what she was loving is exactly what I love. I told her I had just written my paper 90% about the light and space artists and now am realizing I don't work like them; she said, write another paper: that my work is about light and color, specifically color in nature - and the strength is in my TOUCH, and that that is what makes it beautiful - when I am present, fully, for the touch. I said I was concerned that I needed to be able to verbalize what I'm trying to do - and she said, let the work do that. She told me the story of when Tuttle came to Mass Art and she had all her students go : that it was the worst presentation. Tuttle just stood there - there were these long silences and he was very inarticulate. She said it was a terrible presentation. Afterwards, Jill said she totally rethought about words and verbalizing her work - it somehow gave her more freedom. Interesting, I thought. Anyway, she said not to worry, I had enough material that I could already present, just from what is in my space... but for me, it's not about the show, but being present and true to myself... and daring to show what I love, not fussing over it to make some conception of a "finished" piece.

Meeting with Isabel - December 17, 2010

I had a productive final meeting of the semester with Isabel.
We looked at a range of pieces that I had created in the last few months and decided which were the strongest to show in my space at AIB in January:

1) The latest piece
a) Isabel liked that the piece included the florescent light by the fact that yellow material was situated below and above it. Unfortunately, at night and in the photos, the overhead part can't be seen. The optimal condition for my pieces is with both natural and florescent light.
b) I need to attach the piece (loosely) in areas so that it still looks fresh, but so it can be transported

2) The horizon piece
a) needs some tweeking - with the scrim and with the poles
b) needs to be mounted in its own space - not crowded by its adjacency to new piece

3) The 2 light boxes
a) need to crop and hang the layers of fabric - on dowels

The other work I've done needs to be presented with large photos.

sun on mount and semester summary

This is my last large piece. I wanted to see how freely I could use the silk - how unfettered it could be- how much like a child's drawing it could express the idea of dawn, which I am equating to a child's drawing already with it's accent on the horizon line and silhouetted shapes.


Salley Knight
Professor Deb Todd Wheeler
Summary – Semester 3
December, 2010

Summary

This has been a particularly rich semester for me. Not only do I feel that I have found some truly inspirational artists, but I am feeling more on target in my own work. I started off with two ideas in mind: to see how to allow the silk itself to express more in my work, and to find armature that helped support the silk. The pieces that I began with were pure play – with the material and colors. I used old frames to build awkward boxes and used flagpoles to support hanging material. I was working loosely with the idea of dawn and the idea of falling/happenstance. I constructed several more pieces that played on the flat v. 3D theme that came up in this first piece. I experimented with light boxes. I explored adding different kinds of lighting and ended up using fluorescents with my larger pieces. In November, I ended up deconstructing one of my larger works and reassembling the parts into a piece that was inspired by the Ann Hamilton talk and the book on Spencer Finch. Thanks to them, I began asking what it was that really intrigued me about dawn. I realized that it was not just the light, or the invisible becoming visible, but it was the simplicity of it: it was the one time of day when the horizon line was so highlighted. The lack of sun made everything appear 2D. Like a children’s drawing, my art dealing with dawn became the chance to play with the “first” ideas: line as horizon, sun as round, and flat color, a world that momentarily is split between light and dark.

traditional dyed piece

In the last while I had done some more traditional dyeing - still working with the idea of how light penetrates or doesn't at dawn. I worked on some translucent material and not. I'm not sure what I think of what I've gotten so far -