Artist Talk by Virginia Folkestad

Accompanying the Installation

“...noiseless foot of time”

presented

May 4, 2019

Sandra Phillips Gallery

47 W. 11th Avenue

Denver, Colorado

As a way to explain my inspiration, I’m going to tell you a story about an artist I know. She told me about having spent her childhood in, what she called, a house without words. Her mother and father were evidently, very devoted to each other and she was an only child, there were no siblings to talk to, she was very much alone. There was definitely an economy of words in the household; no dinnertime conversation, no art talk, no philosophy of life, no general conversation, not much of anything verbally.

She told me that when she was maybe 6 years old, she spent a lot of time carving out hidden spaces in her backyard bushes and arranging those spaces for play. She thinks when she was about 8 years old, she often climbed a huge Carob tree in her front yard and built an area for play in those enormous, thick branches, not with extra lumber but just by knowing the intricacies of the tree and choosing the perfect place to be...she says she can still feel the nuances of those branches...that memory of touch.

She lived in the same bungalow with Modernist furnishings her whole childhood but had no other family connection to art or design. Some of her happiest memories, she says were when she was drawing and painting and she has a clear memory of the excitement she felt when an adult babysitter, helping her with a coloring book, introduced the idea that she must keep the crayon color within the lines.

Always feeling out of place in her childhood situation, she left home when she was 17 for a distant college. She remembers only her painting and drawing classes from those first college years and really had no career direction but was driven to learn. After two years of college, she married and continued her education in a non-traditional way, only learning what she was truly interested in. Along the way, she was attracted to the structure, texture and especially the tools of weaving. She became strongly interested in objects, such as those weaving tools and she began weaving less and constructing weaving tools more. She also began making wooden outdoor furniture with hand tools, while questioning and learning where her aptitudes and interests were leading her.

At this time, she had no idea that there were female sculptors....it never crossed her mind that she could combine her 2 dimensional art experience with another dimension. After a few years when her children were older, she returned to college where she learned about women and sculpture and artists like Louise Nevelson and Louise Bourgeois. She learned what was happening in the world of Conceptual Art at that time through the work of David Ireland and she learned about Installation Art through the work of Ann Hamilton and others. In this second iteration of college, she was introduced to new skills that hadn’t been offered to her before, such as welding, forging and woodworking and she embraced the idea of non-functional / conceptual objects and Installations. She had found her place.

Some of you have probably already guessed that I’m that artist and that’s an abbreviated version of my early life. I use it here to illustrate certain early occurrences in my life that continued throughout and led me to make art that’s authentic to me.

I see those very early memories of the comfort of nature, the organization of physical space and the absence of words as the beginnings of how I make art today:

Building natural spaces devoid of verbal language but rather, infused with visual language.

So to talk about this work in particular: I have used aluminum mesh in several sculptures and Installations. I feel very connected to it, maybe because of my history with the woven surface but I’m also intrigued by the challenge of using the man-

made, industrial material to reference the natural. About 4 years ago, I was again experimenting with the mesh, when one day I came across a quote from Barbara Bender, a landscape anthropologist, “Landscape, like Time never stands still”. I have always been an avid gardener and that quote resonated deeply with me, I wanted to express it visually. I had actually been dancing around that concept...well, actually it was 2 concepts that I was dancing around and the quote brought them together.

As I work, my mind is very active and, in the case of the Five Scapes, (definition of scape being “a slender stalk that comes directly from the root”), I had just read that Barbara Bender quote, so my mind was very actively thinking about landscape and time as I worked on these.

• I was re-reading Einstein’s Dreams

• I was thinking about the elusiveness of time, how it can seem short in some instances and long in others

• I was thinking about landscape and how strong it is, how we can manipulate it, make it do what we want it to do but if we don’t continue with that control, entropy creeps in and the landscape returns to it’s level of lowest energy in fairly short order. Why are we not satisfied with that level of lowest energy? Some human control of landscape comes from the needs of agriculture but why is our definition of beauty seemingly at odds with the natural order of the landscape? How are we different?

• I was also thinking about the grid as a measurement tool. We divide the land with grids, we divide the garden with grids. We also measure time with grids, putting time into the visual format of charts and calendars. The grid became an important undercurrent in this Installation.

• Aluminum mesh is a grid and I worked with it extensively as the base structure for four of the Scapes. The concept of the grid flows throughout the Installation and defines the relationship between the work.

As I worked on all of this that you see in the gallery, I was thinking all of those thoughts and hopefully, without sounding too mystical or vague (because this is my process and I don’t totally understand it either), this is what happens: those questions and thoughts are in my mind and they travel down to my hands, come through my hands and direct my actions as I work, at least that’s the way it feels. I find myself making and remaking until the form in my mind becomes a reality. I don’t understand it or

necessarily want to understand it but this is my best explanation of how I work.

Now, if you can imagine this process: You want to make a sculpture. Where do you start? The choices are unlimited. Most often, the kindest things you can offer to an artist, are limitations. What if there are no limitations? You’re building something in space...what is the form? What are the materials? What is it? Often I’m interested in a material but just as often I’m intrigued by an idea. It doesn’t matter which comes first and I don’t necessarily remember the order by the time I’m finished. I just have to start and in the end, it’s the non-linear layering of ideas, materials and time that defines the sculpture.

I doesn’t matter to me whether all of this is readily apparent in the finished work but I do think that some of these ideas can be felt in the work. I’m hoping that all that I’ve explained adds more layers of understanding and that the explanations are a reward for being here and wanting to take a deeper look.

Now, if you look at Ever Present.... it’s the 2nd Scape... I’ll quickly walk through my process.

•. It began as 4 layers of mesh that were rolled at the top...it was maybe a 5” cylinder of rolled mesh at the top

• I drew a serpentine form in space with heavy annealed wire.

• I put the wire behind the layers of mesh

• I left some of the materials in the piece and took others out.

• I added green machine stitching in areas

• I wanted the structure of thin, woven wire to be a part of it.

• I made a length of handwoven wire and added it.

• I looked at it for a few months.

• I left some of the materials in the piece and took others out.

• I cut the mesh vertically and rolled each narrow piece around a steel rod..something about those shapes reminded me of landscape.

• I worked intuitively.

• I looked at it for a few months

• I added more vertical rolls

• I let them trail onto the floor.

• I added more narrow, rolled mesh to get density.

• I stitched green on more mesh.

• I cut that mesh into narrow strips and rolled it.

• I added those rolls.

• I took most of those vertical rolls out.

• I had decision fatigue, so I looked at it for more months.

An aside: Sometimes the literally thousands of decisions become overwhelming..I was working on all of the Scapes at the same time. We have four grown children, all of them supportive of what I do but two of them will brainstorm with me. I can get so stuck..that’s what I call decision fatigue, so their brainstorming with me is critical in order to continue.

• I loosened the horizontal rolls at the top.

• I added the green of French knots

I’ll leave the process for this sculpture now about mid-way to completion and move on to another part of the Installation.

Look at Suspended in Time on the East Wall:

I consider this to be one piece. It can be separated into specific segments but in this gallery Installation, it’s one piece.

• I started making French knots after studying the history of moss.

• I liked the texture of the mass of knots.I made round cotton forms

• I liked the knots on those rounded forms.

• I made a lot of them.

• I altered small pine boxes.

• I started putting the small, masses of French knots in the small pine boxes.

• I liked the containment. It spoke of landscape, human intervention and control to me.

• I made many.

• I arranged them on my studio wall and looked at them for a year

• I saw how they made a landscape

• I made small adjustments.

• I added more boxes.

• I looked at them for more months.

• The wall wasn’t finished.

• I made a timeline out of small, delicate wire circles.

• I saw how the line did double-duty as a horizon line

• The wall still wasn’t finished.

• I set all of the pine boxes on fire …the chemical reaction of fire was exactly what I’d been looking for.

• The char of the fire changed the relationship between all of the elements on my studio wall..in some ways, it felt like starting over

• The delicate, wire circles weren’t visually strong enough to counter the fire-darkened boxes

• I made hand-formed, dense, graphite-infused thermoplastic squares that returned the timeline/horizon-line to it’s original visual strength.

Again, I’ll leave the process of this piece about 1/2 of the way to completion.

Back Wall

I call these sketches in three dimensions.

This is how I sketch. I usually sketch a bit with pencil in a sketchbook but these experiments and forms tell me more than sketches in a book. I mostly write in the sketchbook and add some small sketches. I experiment with materials extensively because I often visualize something that I think will be wonderful but when I actually try it, the unexpected happens and 50% of the time it’s not usable.

• I test what material will do

• I test until it fails and becomes something I can’t use.

• I try many materials in each work and it’s usually very clear what works and what doesn’t work, visually. Most of these didn’t work in the piece for which they were intended but they are great ideas and I’ll eventually use the information contained in them in other works.

I want to mention that, as you know, artists don’t make art in a vacuum and those that support them in various ways are extremely important. My husband, Jim, who makes it possible for me to be authentic, my adult children who brainstorm, patiently, (mostly) with me: Justin and Jennifer, my other 2 adult children who now with their spouses and children are interested, supportive and excited about what I do and Sandra, who generously took a leap of faith. Thanks to all of you for being interested.

I’ll end this talk with a quote by Delmore Schwartz

*Alchemy / change / Time is the fire in which we burn.”

Questions?