Field Trip #2

Field Trip #2

On October 28^th 2013 I attended Anne Wilson’s lecture: Objects and Performances from six in the evening until the end of the presentation.  She’s a very well known artist and has been presented at shows all across the country and the world.  Wilson is a Chicago-based visual artist who employs sculpture, drawings, performance and video that explore themes of time, loss, private and social rituals.  She tries to use materials from strategies from everyday materials.

 She told us about lace, what she likes about it and how it inspires her work.  How everything about lace embodies what she’s doing with art.  The intricately woven pattern of lace is a piece of art in and of itself.  The complicated webbing of lace mirrors the cultures that made them and the complicated economic and industrial factors that led to their production.  She wanted to perform this interconnectedness of lace in a way that commented on the structures that led to its production.  She would lay out a city’s topography and then the webbing of the lace to give substance to the lattice structure of the buildings.  Lace comes from all over the world so it’s not an exclusively Western representation of art, textile and culture.  There are all sorts of lace: needle lace, cutwork lace, bobbin lace, tape lace, knotted lace, crocheted lace, mucus lace, machine-made lace.  She explained that the lines between weaving and lace are very blurry and that what many would call lace today has been found in cultures all over the world.

Wilson went on to describe and expand on another textile related artistic endeavor.  She saw potential in a loom, used for weaving t performs the function of culture, community, art, dance and space.

Culture in the sense of putting people back in touch with a very tactile form of industry and cultural expression.  Community in that it puts people back in touch with communal roots and engages them in the present with a collaborative endeavor.  Art in an aesthetic sense, the colors for the loom were sometimes uniform and at others arranged in a way that at least wasn’t painful on the eyes.

The use of space and body was so rhythmic and dancelike she collaborated with a UK youth dance school to create an exhibition based off of the movements of the loom exhibition.  The children essentially made a loom with no string and instead focused on their bodies movements within the art of weaving.

Her next exhibition was a collaboration with southern communities mainly in the state of Tennessee and there within the weavers guild.  She noted how involved and proud the community was of the project because it was something they felt they were apart of.  The kids helped to create the spools using an old hand crank and wheel method.  Then Wilson concentrated the local weavers guild to make the actual cloth.  The piece and materials documenting the process of making the cloth were on display in Tennessee and galleries around the country.

Her body of work is interesting in that it revolves around a similar them of industrialized art and it’s relation to culture.  She tries to perform or highlight the different aesthetic and cultural elements of different textiles and methods used to produce them.