Summary- Fall 09
Professor Julia Scher
Salley Knight
SUMMARY

If I could put one word on this semester it’s been “exploration”: of materials, of my vision, and of my inspiration. I created works inspired by Jessica Stockholder, Richard Tuttle, and Anna Torma. I explored ideas about my eyesight, line and embroidery, and ways to bring more dimension to my work by creating silk cubes and whorls.
At the beginning of December I felt lost. I had gone so far into my explorations that I had lost my bearings. I related to Bruce Nauman’s experience in art school of feeling like a bouncing ball. Where am I? What questions am I pursuing in this visual medium called art?
After all is said and done, I seem to be still dealing with the question that I came to Lesley with, only now slightly reframed: what is it to love the land? Is it about my memory of the light? Is it about the feeling of the earth beneath my feet (or the horse’s feet) in climbing or descending? Is it the expanse of space, the light, the warmth of the air from on high versus the cool, closed, narrow valley? Is it in contrast to the world of people/schools/order? These are the questions I have just begun to address.
The artist that I found whose work comes closest to addressing some of these ideas is Maya Lin. In Maya Lin’s book Systemic Landscapes, Richard Andrews writes:
Lin’s …works explore how our understanding of landscape is framed by our personal experience with the natural world. Such knowledge is, of necessity, fragmentary, based on relationships to particular landscapes, and leads us to recognize that we can very fully understand nature, in much the same way that we cannot completely comprehend consciousness, because we exist within it (62).
In his book Space and Place: the Perspectives of Experience , the geographer Yi-Fu Tuan suggests that the full range of feeling and thought are included in the experience of land:
Experience (of the outside world) is compounded of feeling and thought. Human feeling is not a succession of discrete sensations: rather memory and anticipation are able to wield sensory impacts into a shifting stream of experience so that we speak of a life of feeling as we do of a life of thought…both are ways of knowing (10).
What particularly intrigues me about Maya Lin is how she has systematized the landscape. In particular, her 2006 work Blue Lake Pass (Lin, 28-32) not only feels familiar to me but offers me a model that I might be able to translate into silk. I had attempted to do just that in a few pieces going into AIB. It was frustrating because I had been dependent on the frame as support for the loose cloth.
However, this fall I found ways for the silk to self-support: with sewn boxes and whorls (spirals). I now have the means to convey sections of landscape by placing the whorls inside the boxes. Furthermore, I have the color of the silk to convey the way the light affects the land. I see a lot of possibilities with this: that I can expand the 3D further with hidden structures under the silk, that I can work in a range of sizes, that I can be as simple or complex as I want, that I can be very structural or lean in the direction of feeling.



Works cited

Lin, Maya, Systemic Landscapes, Seattle: Henry Art Gallery, 2006. Print.

Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place: the Perspectives of Experience (Minneapolis University of Minnesota Press), 1977. Print.

wings

Okay, what an interesting time it's been. A number of ideas relating to vision and art are just coming to the fore for me. They were precipitated by a Tim Crouch theatre event at the Boston ICA. He performed a piece in an art gallery, and the subtext was about what we see- or don't see- and the expectations we have about art and the value we attach to it. What I most enjoyed was that he would describe a visual setting or event not directly related to the piece of art he was standing next to - and he constantly asked you to "look". So I got the image of the art and then the image he was emotionally responding to - and BOTH were real. From there I began to think of images that seem very real to me that are never based on anything seen - such as an angel's wing. This related to a dream I had had about flying. I thought, why not make this dream image concrete? Later, I thought, why not make it less concrete - therefore more real? The photos show incomplete ideas - both pieces are in progress.

whorls

Over the last weeks I have been dying lots of cloth to make many whorls. I use the very soft sueded silk and roll it with the stiffer organza so it stands more upright.
I was specifically looking for how the grey worked to enhance the other colors - and also the richness of the darks working against the lights.
Unfortunately my camera is quite inaccurate in capturing the subtleness of the colors.
Last night I was really excited by a discussion at the Boston Architectural College on the Meaning of Place. I was particularly impressed by Mikyoung Kim who has done outdoor work using water and stone in "resculpting" a river that runs through Seoul. Afterwards, I began to see my work as landscape - or in a landscape. The last piece, I am using the reflective material both as some form of metal (the vertical shape) and water (the horizontal). I think of the whorls as sculptural pieces that might blow or spin in the wind.

October 28 and paper

I just had a terrific session with Heidi.
I showed her my work which, sadly, does not translate well to photography (above)

She remarked on how this work felt like I was onto something- that she has that sense because she can look at my oldest work that I have in my studio - watercolors from 15 (more?) years ago - and can see this work is directly related.

It felt very right. I'm working with my silk, with rich colors and it has an element of fun and unpredictability. I'm going to expand all this~

I am also posting here my paper, which was about how I see and how that plays into my art:

Salley Knight

Professor Julia Scher

Personal Essay – Group 1

October 2009

Personal Vision

How did I see the world in the first years of my life? How does that bear on the art I do now? Those questions have been with me for years. I had a story about my eyes: I was born with poor muscular control of my eyes and therefore my sight was blurry. I had a condition called strabismus. My eyes wandered inward and outward. I do not remember what that was like for me. What I do remember is the startling clarity of my first scene after the corrective operation: boats on the Charles River. The sharpness of that image stood out for me, so I assumed that my earlier vision must have been blurry.

When I searched “strabismus” I found a scientific description of the condition. A.D.A.M. defines strabismus as “…a disorder in which the eyes do not line up in the same direction when focusing. Strabismus is caused by a lack of coordination between the eyes. As a result, the eyes look in different directions and do not focus at the same time on a single point…. the cause is unknown…”

I also found a lead to a recent book, Fixing My Gaze, by Susan Barry, a neurobiologist who, like me, had been diagnosed with childhood strabismus. I related to her experience when she discovered at age 20 that she did not have stereovision or stereopsis, the ability to see out of both eyes at once. Similarly, I had no idea that I had only limited ability to see 3D until age 45, when my son was tested and I could see 3D only the first few sets on the test card. I was told then that the ability to see 3D was related to eye-brain development, learned in a child’s first 5 or 7 years, and that after that critical period, the brain was set. I was now fascinated to read that Susan Barry, as a neurobiologist, chose to investigate that idea, and at age 48, after intensive vision therapy, her brain had responded and she was startled by her first experiences of 3D vision.

Through Susan Barry’s explanations of how the eye and brain work together and descriptions of her experience, I came to realize that the story I had told myself about my early years was inaccurate. Instead of seeing blurry images, which is what I see when I cross my eyes now, I then saw flat images. Barry writes about what happens with strabismus:

Since my eyes were not straight and saw different things, the binocular neurons in my brain received conflicting input. This situation set up a competition between my two eyes, and for each neuron, one or the other eye won out. Each neuron in my brain now responded to input from only one eye. This change most likely happened in the first year of my life…(11)

In my early years my world must have appeared flat. It would not have felt strange because I never knew a different way of seeing. However, it did shape my experiences. It was more difficult to be among a group of unpredictably fast moving classmates. So, as a small child, I remember I would separate myself out in the pandemonium of recess. I could not figure out how to join the fast, furious play. It felt more comfortable to watch. I became a witness: they were on one plane while I was on another. I remember as a small child when the teacher asked me why I was not playing; I did not know at the time but now it all makes sense. I was soothed to read that Susan Barry reported the same feeling as a child: that she was in a separate world, watching.

So, did I not experience 3D at all? I did not have stereovision. However, I could judge where something was relative to something else by shadows or obstruction of view; and I could sense distance as I moved through it. As I grew older, recess activity turned to organized games and I could easily join with the help of structure. With the focus on the ball, players moved in relationship to it: I could judge distances and understand the space.

I lacked stereovision – without realizing it, I was only seeing the world as flat. How did I understand a 3D world? I was fascinated to realize that this same dilemma is part of artists’ challenges as well. In her book, Vision and Art, the Biology of Seeing, Margaret Livingstone describes how artists, in particular painters, attempted to achieve 3D effects.

Livingstone points out that perhaps the first person to make note of this issue was Leonardo Da Vinci who she quotes:

It is impossible that a painting, even in which the outlines, shade, light, and color are copied to the highest perfection, can appear with the same relief as a real object in nature, unless this natural object is looked at over a long distance and with a single eye (140).

For a period of time in the18th and 19^th centuries, viewers were asked to look through a small hole in a curtain to view paintings in order to achieve the 3D effect in this way (140).

Livingstone credits the Impressionists with discovering another way to suggest depth: blurriness. By avoiding sharp lines of contrast, the two separate eyes do not have the same clear edges to focus on and to interpret flatness of the painting surface. Due to the fact that the painting itself does not read as flat, the other indicators such as shading and perspective feel stronger (143).

According to Livingstone, the Impressionists and post-Impressionists also found another means of suggesting 3D. By using repetition, such as of leaves for foliage, tiny dots for atmosphere, they could fool the eyes. Repetition over a large area meant that one eye could not settle and choose one image to match with the other eye. Livingstone explains it in this way:

When we view a three-dimensional scene, objects in front or behind the plane of fixation cast images on non-corresponding points of the two retinas. The brain must decide which images in the right retina …(to) match with images in the left. Usually the brain is correct in settling on the most parsimonious explanation. Repeated patterns, however, …confuse the matching process, since the several explanations may be equally valid, and this creates an illusion of depth (146).

What fascinates me about these three artistic means for creating depth that Livingstone mentions is that they all are vividly part of my experience. Long distance viewing – perhaps least important to my art- has always come easily to me. However, my attraction to blurriness has been a strong characteristic of my work. For example, in the body of work I created to submit to AIB, I used layers of translucent silk but I never cut the edges because the shredded edges gave a soft line- a blur. The numerous lines and edges, even the tiniest pieces of color all had to have these blurry edges. The pieces of dried plant were often obscured by the silk that softened their outline, and the application of paint on the frames was loose and blended. Moreover, repetition was apparent throughout this work. I tended to invoke a loose reference to the grid, using many smaller squares. Plant material comes in with lines or spirals one after another. I noticed that the motif of repetition came up, but I wasn’t sure why. It makes sense now – that I was seeking visual dimension that was otherwise missing for me. Recently, I created embroideries of various images of lines of children, which seemed to be an abrupt departure from my previous abstract work. What I loved about the finished images was the information available from the very blurry line, and that there were repeated images, with slight variations. I had wondered about those pieces after they were done. Why was I doing illustration? In fact, I believe, I was exploring the themes that have attracted me over and over again- the blur, the repetition.

Furthermore, I now see why certain other artists intrigue me. I refer to Jessica Stockholder, who claims that she works in 2D that happens to be 3D ( qtd. in Carruthers, et al, 17-18) and to Richard Tuttle, whose 20 Floor Drawings in Amsterdam, 1988 (ICA Amsterdam, 8-48)) look like sculptures. Both of these artists are playing with the interplay between 2D and 3D in a way that I relate to intuitively.

When I set out to write this paper, I expected I would be describing my experience of blurriness in early childhood and how that recurs in my work. I had not realized that I didn’t see blurs as a child, but that I was living in a 2D world. Nor did I realize how that has informed my work ever since – that the shifts in my vision that have affected me so profoundly continue to be a driving force in my understanding the art that attracts me and the art I endeavor to create.

Works Cited

A.D.A.M., Strabismus: Overview, Treatment, Symptoms, Causes. Google Health, Google.com /health, n.d., Web. 15 October 2009.

Barry, Susan, Fixing My Gaze: A Scientists’ Journey into Seeing in Three Dimensions, New York: Perseus: 2009, Print.

Booth, Jenny, Susan Barry, ww.week.com, n.d. Web. 15 October 2009

Carruthers, Elspeth, et al, Jessica Stockholder: Kissing the Wall, Houston: Blaffer Gallery, 2004, Print.

ICA /Amsterdam, Richard Tuttle, The Hague: Sdu Publishers, 1991, Print.

Livingstone, Margaret, Vision and Art: the biology of seeing, New York:

Harry N. Abrams, 2002, Print.

I heard Bill Irwin speak last Thursday and Janet Echelman this Wednesday. Irwin was brilliant and spoke to the question of what is art? That it is the task of each generation to answer for themselves... and then went on to describe his definition: artist is first in relationship to all that is/the endless possibility. He/she asks his/her question and has the job then of finding the tools, the means to create a response. This then gets shared with others - artists, then general public - then culture - finally, history. But all are present all the time, inseparable: possibility, artist, culture and history. Janet Echelman was less verbal. However her work was impressive: huge sky born sculpture. She began as a textile artist, so it was of particular interest to me - that she has found a way to work so large and outdoors, too.
The photos are of my tiny work. In my mind I am exploring ideas that I might make large. I also am exploring color and ways that the silk self-supports. In the first 2, I am playing the red and yellows against the varying greys.

morphing of the cubes

Just playing - adding, squishing, grouping.

cubes

I spent the last while dying silk in shades of gray. I wanted to have the grey as contrast to my saturated colors of previously dyed silks that I have on hand. However, the grey itself attracted me. I wanted to see how I could filter it through the gauze, so I used red embroidery thread to sew cubes with one side solid grey silk and the other sides undyed organza . However, once the cubes were complete, the shades of grey were so muted that they were tough to differentiate. Therefore I decided to remove the "lid", at which point the greys seemed to shine. The silk puffed up in a soft way that seemed to add to its allure, especially as it played off the relatively stiff sides of the boxes.