Artist statement
I have been doing holloware-- hammering 3D forms out of flat sheet metal-- for nearly 40 years now. It is the closest I can come to meditation and it satisfies my need to do something expressive that involves both mind and body in a kind of conversation. When Covid-19 hit us, with this country's terribly polarized response to it, I became rather depressed and stopped working for awhile. It was when I conceived of the piece "Beating Covid to Death" that I was able to begin to take out some of my sadness and anger by beating the words out of the metal as I raised it. Several other pieces have come out of my perception of the pandemic and our national differences as to of how to deal with it.
I have always been interested in the relationship of objects and language, and over the past 10 years I have tried to bring these two means of communication, the verbal and the visual, together by adding words to some of the pieces, including some in this show. It has given me a chance to externalize my despair at the increasingly depersonalizing world we live in. In a series I call "Forms of Violence", I have looked at bureaucratic language as one of the sources of depersonalization and isolation, covering the surfaces of the vessels with phrases that seem to mock real communication and to divide us from one another. Some of the wordless pieces are also attempts to depict states of anxiety or the tension between inner and outer realities metaphorically.
I have recently begun a new series of pieces in which I explore the idea of how we think about migration of humans and plants, which move and evolve and intermix and have ever since life began. As we destroy the climate and the ecosystems around us, which of them/us will have the resilience to survive in the changed circumstances?
Thanks very much to my studio mates, who always provide help and companionship as we work. Especially thanks to Agnes Chwae, who made the small plants I needed for my Persistence of Weeds pieces, and Ginny Wickman, who made the wonderfully fat hands for Chai with Vladimir, and helped ready the wax feet for casting.
- Lynn Whitford, April 2022