Carolina's Got Art - First Place Award

"The Space Between"  45" x 25" x 5"  steel, bamboo, lacquer, paint

This piece "The Space Between" was accepted into an exhibition Carolina's Got Art a the Elder Gallery in Charlotte, NC. Lance Esplund was the juror for the exhibition. He is the art critic for Bloomberg News and Muse.  It was an honor to be selected by Lance Esplund for the exhibition and to have "The Space Between" chosen for the First Place Award. Below is the statement I wrote to accompany the piece.

"The Space Between"  Statement

       The vessel is a metaphor of interior and exterior, of containment, of transport and journey.  It is both universal and personal. A vessel can symbolize self. The vessel in all its many forms is my muse. These vessels are enigmatic being boat pod shapes, or pod tool shapes or tool vessel shapes. Once a piece is begun, it takes on a life or story of it’s own. As I respond to the process and materials, a dialogue develops between the piece, the material, and me. The vessel allows me a vehicle to investigate new ideas, materials, narratives and relationships.

       A number of years ago I became interested in how shadows extend the presence of a piece. Shadows are ethereal, always changing and can appear very solid yet one cannot touch a shadow, it touches you. For many years I have explored clay to create very solid and stable vessel forms.  I am interested in how shadows extend the presence of a piece. In “The Space Between” the individual vessels represent the essence of a vessel, stripped down to its basic elements, its skeleton.  The essence of the vessel is felt and brought alive by its shadows and its interplay of shadows with its neighbor’s shadows.

       I am interested in duality and the idea of a grouping of vessels that are intrinsically bound together by placement and the interplay of shadows. “The Space Between” explores relationships and inter-relationships between individual pieces. This grouping of vessels is intrinsically connected by the interplay of shadows. Created separately, these individual pieces are presented as a grouping to strengthen and highlight a sense of similarity and contrast. A dialogue is created by the contrast of line, and form and how the 3-dimensional forms are translated into 2-dimensional shadows.  Each vessel is an individual, separate and yet touched by the neighboring vessel’s shadow. The shadows overlap and weave together creating a silent conversation whispered on the wall. These negative spaces and shadows enter into the dialogue, extending the piece and representing the silent energy or the unsaid between individuals. 

Many months have passed and many changes since I last wrote. Hietala is now legally my new maiden name. So a new chapter begins. This spring semester I am teaching adjunct at Haywood Community College in Clyde, NC,  and really enjoying it. In Advanced Craft Design, 3-D design, we have been working with line using wire, planes using foam core, manipulation and transformation using clay, and our next project will be functional containers of gut and wire. I have been intrigued by translucent gut stretched taught over wire forms for a number of years.

This is one of my gut and wire pieces, "Instrument of Motion - Textiles" that is currently on exhibition in Breaking Ground: Innovative Craft at HandMade in America here in Asheville. The exhibition was curated by Kathryn Gremley, Director of the Penland Gallery and showcases work by artist that are pushing the boundary of their medium in unexpected ways. The exhibition runs from March 8th through
May 31, 2013.

"Instruments of Motion" is a series of paddle like forms that are inspired by some aspect of trade goods that were brought back by vessel. When I think of vessels, I am a romantic and inspired by the era before diesel, when sails and the wind carried new ideas, materials and information around the globe.

"Instruments of Motion - Textiles" is a piece inspired by the labels I remove from my clothes, and save of course. Most of them are made in far off places. The labels represent textiles disseminated across the globe by vessel. Paddles/oars or what I have come to call instruments of motion were an integral part of that journey.

It is created of steel wire in the manner of tinkering or working by hand with simple tools. Hog gut is stretched and dries taunt and translucent. It has a natural tone that alludes to nostalgia and a sense of time passage. In this piece there are three compartments that house mother of pearl buttons and labels removed from clothing. I inherited a jar of white mother of pear buttons from my grandmother. Over the years I have used them and replaced them with new mother of pearl buttons that I have collected and saved.  The labels are presented showing their front and backside for variation in color. The work is stationary yet creates the sense of motion and sound that a rattle would create. Due to the delicate nature of the gut I now present the work in a white shadowbox frame for protection.

Subconcious and Memory an Upcoming Exhibition at Blue Spiral 1

The summer solstice has passed. The last year and a half have been spent processing my Dad's suicide and my unexpected divorce. Now it is time for me to use my creativity to begin a new chapter. I have been asked to be in an exhibition at Blue Spiral 1 opening August 2nd. It is a group exhibition themed around the Subconscious and Memory. I have chosen to continue exploring the vessel, images from my recent dreams and the idea that words record our memories, dreams and subconscious. I love words and the act of writing or in this case physically inscribing. This is a detail of a salt-fired porcelain vessel that is part of a grouping that will be in the exhibition. The piece "Holding on to...." was inspired by my Dad's alzheimer's. He had a little black book that he carried religiously and wrote down everything, it was his way of keeping hold of his mind. When ever he got lost from this reality, he would take out his book and find what he had written down, what he was suppose to be doing, what he needed to do. etc. Not everything could be kept track of so easily and so the past filled in, replaying over and over again. The buttery surface of the helios porcelain allows one to write easily. I inscribed words, stories, memories all over the surfaces of the vessels and paddle blades. Areas of words were covered with shellac to reserve them and then the unprotected areas were washed with water and a sponge, gently washing away the words and what they meant. Subsequent layers of shellac and washing created a surface where there were areas washed away and areas still very real and readable. The sparkle of the glass inside the vessels alludes to the sparkle of spirit inside all of us. The pieces was a wonderful piece to work on.

"Holding On To...."

  30" x 39" x 4," salt fired porcelain, oxides, steel wire, linen thread