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As a final conclusion to my Studio Art St. Mary’s Project, I will recount my three primary artistic sources in relation to my own work and installation this semester. After providing information regarding my artistic influences this year, I will detail the ways in which these sources of inspiration came together to assist me in the completion and compilation of this project. The three artists who have been the most influential throughout the course of this project are sculptor Kiki Smith, painter Anselm Kiefer, and sculptor Andy Goldsworthy.

Before I begin an analysis of my sources, I will briefly recount my themes and goals overall for this project. My project focuses on the idea of dichotomy as a culturally unhealthy way of categorizing the world and human beings. The dualities that I tend to think on are sacred/profane, male/female, self/other, heaven/hell, god/man, pure/impure, community/solitude, and nature/artifice. For most of my life, I have felt as though I have been trapped in a maelstrom between these dualities. During my time at St. Mary‘s I developed my world view and started to believe that this was not just my condition but the human condition. Through my studies, as a double major in Studio Art and Religious Studies, I realized that I wanted to tell a story both singular and universal, both sacred and profane, both primordial and ongoing: the story of humanity as that which embodies and connects opposites.

Omega/Alpha is my attempt to traverse the ways in which we separate the world, each other, and ourselves into dichotomies. After all these years, I still feel on a daily basis that I am being pulled between poles, but I am always aware that the possibility of reconnecting these opposites is within my reach. So, my artistic goal was to create both potential narratives of that separation as well as possible narratives of reconnection. In the show you are about to see, I have used mixed media to document musings on how I, or we, came to think in terms of opposites, and my hope is that these works will hint at the possibility of rediscovering interconnectivity.

My inspiration comes from religious and philosophical texts, poetry, photographs, my own bodily experience and found objects. Materials have been very meaningful in the making of this show because they reflect my, or our, daily struggle between nature and artifice, community and solitude. I use some manufactured materials like acrylic paint, cellophane and hot glue, but I spend a lot of time outdoors collecting organic materials like seeds, straw and dirt to use in projects. Of equal importance to this show is the element of relief in each work. It indicates that I like to examine as many layers of a dynamic as possible, but I always feel a wax and wane between these layers. These themes and interests in my show developed because of my background and interests, but an enormous part of that development was facilitated by the aforementioned artists that I was introduced to during the SMP process. The first artist whose work significantly altered my own was Kiki Smith.

All of Smith’s figures are fixed by their vulnerability, that is to say that the figures are held and contained by their fragmented nature. Smith’s work Pee Body shows a female figure who is held down by her own excrement, the lost components of her self. Of her work, she says, “Our bodies have been broken apart bit by bit and need a lot of healing; our whole society is very fragmented…Everything is split, and presented as dichotomies -- male/female, body/mind -- and those splits need mending.” She also refers to her figures as “fragmented” or as representing “the permeable body that leaks and dissolves.” She references an interest in Frankenstein’s plight to reassemble bodies, an interest in death and death-defying, and her relationship with Christianity and suffering. Of the latter, she says, “In working with the body, I feel I’m actually making physical manifestations of psychic and spiritual dilemmas…that puts me in a Catholic tradition, but in Catholicism there’s a fetishizing of experience -- there’s empathy for suffering but also an artificiality; the suffering is removed and objective. And I think you have to look at everything as interrelated.”

Foremost, I would like to discuss Smith’s actual formal, artistic creations in comparison to my own. The most prominent difference is that she works in sculpture while I work in both 2D and 3D media. In terms of similarity, however, we actually have a decent number of formal elements in common. I see everything I depict as essentially tied to humanity, as Smith does, so almost every work I create contains a human figure. I believe my ideas to be central to the human perspective, and so it becomes difficult for me to turn my back on the figure artistically. We both also have different (and often convergent) ways of showing the fragmentation and vulnerability of the human being in every image. One common practice we both have is revealing the body in compromised positions. Although I rarely show the defecating body, as Smith does, I do show the leaky sexualized body, which is a more direct representation of vulnerability in terms of my experiences, life, and perspective. We also both show dismembered bodies to reveal the ways in which we use cultural categories to fragment ourselves.

We share the element of horror visually. She says of her work, “It’s through that body language that you read the emotion of the painting. A lot of my own work has a kind of horrificness to it. I don’t want it to be a romance of horror, but horror is present to me.” I will openly admit that my art is significantly more prone to be read as “a romance of horror,” and this is one element of my work that needs to be experimented with. I tend to lean on horror because I perceive it to be that which human beings are most averse to; thus, I want to reveal the elements of the horrific which connect to elements of the divine, or the human, or the vulnerable. My aim is to pay homage to that which is horrific because I believe those things to be necessary and connected to the more positive elements of life.

Similarly, Kiefer and I share an interest in representing death, sleep, transition, the human figure, iconic elements of nature, but, more importantly, we share an interest in rich, unusual materials and a chaotic process of creation. Kiefer paints with emulsions, for example, which involves a lack of control on the artist’s part; there is only so much manipulation on the part of the artist that can be imposed during the process. Similarly, I like to use drips which are less controllable, and, for the show, I made a bubble-paint mixture out of soap, watercolor, and water in order to blow bubbles at the surface until I built up a pigment. In terms of materials, Kiefer uses unusual materials such as latex, straw, ash, synthetic resin, burlap, blood, dirt, hare’s fur, sand, iron and leaves. We both utilize gritty, textural materials that may or may not run the risk of deterioration later, and, if that decay happens, the theme of the piece is also tied to that process.

Additionally, some of Kiefer’s earlier works created in the 1970’s share little with my work thematically (as they were essentially rooted in a place I had never been to, Germany), but his constant attention to unusual, unexpectedly rich materials is something that I strove for in my show. Anselm Kiefer is my second source because, simply put, I wanted my materials to be as rich and complex as his are. Kiefer’s attention to material is fantastic, and I think my work began to develop that same sense of an oozy, rich, thick, decaying mass of an unknown material in a strange an expected space in the image.

Finally, I was introduced to Goldsworthy through a course on East Asian philosophies and religions, and he was introduced as an artistic example of Daoist philosophy. Goldsworthy works solely with natural materials, creating impermanent work out in nature. I was attracted to Daoist concepts as well as Goldsworthy’s work and process. I immediately loved his process and his work, but I did not initially recognize his influence on my own artistic practice. His process of collecting and spending time in nature infected me with wonderful ideas, and I found myself watching the paths for art supplies as I walked. Eventually, I was being more spontaneous in my art making, and this became important. In Chunag Tzu’s Inner Chapters, the primary Daoist text, an emphasis is placed on spontaneity. Spontaneity is important in Daoism because it occurs when a person forgets his or her ego and acts without preconceived notions of a self. So, I had discovered one potential way of rethinking duality in my process. My sense of distinctions seemed to fade when I looked for materials. I collected straw, seeds, molts from bugs, stones, bark, and sticks when my instincts guided me towards them. I liked them and the process of collecting so much that I began using the things I found in my art work.

Later, when I realized how heavily Goldsworthy’s work had impacted me, I went back and read my notes from his film Rivers and Tides. He said in the film, “The very thing that brings the work to life is the thing that will cause its death.” This statement illustrates an attention to both dichotomy and the interaction between the poles of that dichotomy. He also said, “I think we misread the landscape when we think of it as pastoral and pretty. There is a darker side to that.” Again, despite my initial emphasis on our artistic differences, his work actually shares a number of conceptual ideas with my own work. He acknowledges the misreading of nature into dichotomies, and a lot of his work involves understanding the intricacies of things that are traditionally categorized as opposed in culture.

Overall, these three sources as well as many others significantly altered and improved the development of my SMP work. Without them and the inspiration they ignited within me, my work would have stagnated and remained in a somewhat underdeveloped state. Because of their influence on my artistic practice, materials and aesthetic, I was able to create an exhibition that I am proud to call my own.