Suspended Animations, Massillon Museum of Art

Land acknowledgement: This exhibition is taking place on Lenape (Delaware) land.

Suspended Animations includes a series of drawings on silk, Horizon Series (2021), and a sculptural installation, entitled Rock Cloud and the Skywalkermothergoddess (2021).

My soul place exists in the place between a great body of water and mountains. I identify geographically as a Pacific Northwesterner: my childhood was lived in Japan and Alaska, and in my adult life I’ve spent most summers on the northern Oregon coast, west of the Cascades. However, living in recent years on the shores of Lake Erie, in the foothills of the westernmost Allegheny Mountains in NY, I’ve found a new soul place - and fallen in love with the vastness of the smallest of the Great Lakes. Absorbing the sky and the atmosphere is a daily ritual, year-round.

I was honored to receive a Cleveland Collective Arts Network exhibition prize at the inaugural 2018 CAN Triennial for my installation, Gyre. A second part of this elemental installation series, Raining Fire (2019) appeared at the American Greetings Gallery W in Westlake, Ohio; The Weight of Resistance (2020) at BayArts last October; Rock Cloud is the latest segment. Other recent work includes 3 iterations of the Biotracings series (2018-2021), a collection of futuristic, natural history objects, or “exprints” of imagined, extinct plant species. This work considers a plausible future, where what is familiar now exists only as skins and tracings of remembered bioforms. The work you see today continues to explore these ideas. 

In the Horizons drawings, abstracted waterscapes provide a ground for drawing these bioforms with pastels. Fragility, maps and trails, tracings, impermanence, and the hidden strength in delicacy, or in what is tender, have always been themes in my work. Silk, my primary medium, creates the illusion of fragility because it is lightweight and diaphanous, but it is also a strong, resilient fiber. 

I draw derivations of biomorphic forms, and arrays of repeated marks or trails over areas of the dyed field. What complicates the apprehension of these drawings while looking at them head on is a reflective feature of silk organza called moiré: the curvilinear effect on the surface of the finely woven silk, created when the silk is sized through callendering presses when it is processed into fabric. I love that what I draw on the silk comes into sharp focus only if you move closer, or shift your perspective to the side of the work. The moiré itself shares this elusive, visual trickery. In The Forever of Stars, I additionally create small openings in both layers of black silk, through pyrography.

I also sought in these pieces the immersion of slow work over time, as all of us determined how to occupy ourselves through the unnerving isolation of the Covid pandemic, and desperate protests for social justice, while a tyrannical psychopath governed our nation.

In Rock Cloud and the Skywalkermothergoddess, the third installation in the elemental series, forms are made using kumo shibori, where silk that’s wrapped around rocks (or other objects) is wetted and dyed. When the fabric dries and the rock is removed, a skin of the solid and heavy object is all that remains. This process provides a complex metaphor for memory that infuses all of my work. In Rock Cloud, I hope to create an immersive experience of dreamy, ascendant “blue-ness.” The cloud-like, suspended figure is a spirit form, floating along some imagined horizon.

This collection of work connects my persistent concerns about environmental catastrophe- of which this pandemic is certainly a part- to the Lake Erie horizon I regularly watch as I think. 

Personal Acknowledgments

Despite physical distance, I remain close with my art family. Thanks to my husband and closest friend, Randy Coleman. Thanks to Rian Brown, Claudio Orso, Douglas Max Utter, Jessica Pinsky, Kristen Cliffel, Liz Maugans, Christine Mauersberger, Christy Gray, John Seyfried, Alice Moore, and Sarah Schuster for their support of this work. 

Special thanks to Emily Vigil, who, with grace, diligence, and helpful staff, thoughtfully planned, publicized, and hung this exhibition. And thanks to Alex Coon, who, with Emily, awarded me the prize that resulted in this exhibition.

Photographs by John Seyfried and the artist.