My VISUAL ARTMAKING
I have not formally studied art, though I grew up surrounded by creators of art in various forms. I watched the artist John Wilson, the father of my best friend, create charcoal images of us kids. I watched my maternal uncle create cartoons for and about my brother and me. My paternal uncle created paintings that were hung on our living room wall and in my bedroom. My mother was a brilliant couturier who taught me to sew, fine finishing techniques, pattern selection and cutting. My father designed audio installations that he often built from scratch in his spare time. He taught me to solder, use tools: pliers, hammers, screwdrivers, wire cutters and strippers. My first stereo was one that I built from a Dynakit, sourcing the tubes that went into it in downtown Manhattan.
I studied violin in elementary school and attended a music and art high school, playing the cello and bassoon and singing in choirs. My undergraduate schedule was crowded with requirements of the effort to become a doctor as a bio psych major at Williams. I’m inordinately grateful for the exquisite and rigorous course that I took under EVA GRUDIN on African art whose final test was similar to defending a thesis. My parents had examples of wooden sculptural art at home in addition to paintings. These always fascinated me and I saw their true source when I studied African art.
A college friend worked at an African dealer, a job involve some repair and restoration, perhaps even lying. He helped me acquire my first piece from my favorite creators, the Dogon. It was an ancestral couple for which I starved for a summer to save the money in the 70s. I later acquired a Dogon stool and a small Bambara deer.
Working at the Corning Museum of Glass introduced me to glassmaking. I took a number of classes and rented time to explore glass blowing, kilnforming, sand casting, and flame working resulting in some blown vessels, cast glass sculptures, kilnform constructions, objects, and materials as well as flame worked figurative beads.
At the same time I worked to learn hand papermaking. I studied at Carriage House. I was a paper maker in residence at the Women’s Studio Workshop, a peak life experience for me. This residency resulted in my Shield Series that I created in glass and in paper for my first solo show in Chicago.
Shields were needed ritualistically and symbolically to enable the generation of black youth to survive the many assaults on them. This was about the time of Amadou Diallo’s death. One of my signature works was a Prayer for Amadou which included kiln formed glass, cast glass and other mixed media materials.
At the same time, I began to explore fiber. I own an eight harness floor loom and an eight harness tabletop loom among many other looms.
Fiber called me. I became suddenly and inexplicably paralyzed. The forms of art making that were once available to me were inaccessibly located in my basement and upstairs studios. The remarkable Mark Lander in New Zealand created a mini, portable paper beater for me that was a lifeline, enabling me to continue to make paper from scratch and explore its sculptural capabilities.
The purchase of a vacuum table furthered my tool kit in terms of paper shaping forming and making. My love of fiber for the manipulation of a line extended to freeform crochet in which a multiplicity of stitches and techniques are used to create garments images and art. My designs and creations been published in a number of crochet journals and magazines, and in the International Freeform Crochet annual book.
This love of line lead to an exploration of metal. Wire spoke to me as it is portable and accessible. I began to make figures and objects out of wire evolving my series I called Les Tetes, which began as bookmarks, but have become wire masks and wire faces using various metals and gauges.
Most recently I sought a material that could do some of the things that paper didn’t, that had a volume and a solidity that I used to be able to realize in glass. That material is cement and so my latest work has been in cement: cement as underpinning, substrate, housing, or vehicle for the wire sculptures; and cement on its own to express other concerns, concerns about transmission and evolution.
I’ve made a series of table top fountains and portals. In addition to the wire cement unions in boats and stele, I like wire for it spontaneity of gesture and its resistance often to my intent. It is expressive and I’m always interested on who or what arrives even though I may try to predetermine what they may look like they always seem to look like their own. I enjoy working with as many media as possible for me, in a wheelchair, to express my concerns