ON SITE / ARTISTS' PROJECTS: NANCY BLUM

Visual Arts Center of Richmond, formerly the Hand Workshop Art Center

June 2 – July 24, 2005

MATERIAL PRESENCE by Ashley Kistler

Curator, Hand Workshop Art Center

To call Nancy Blum's work obsessive and labor-intensive is an understatement. Fifteen years ago, while pursuing graduate studies at the Cranbrook Academy of Art, Blum began using clay as a sculptural medium, attracted to its "luscious, friendly, and touch-sensitive qualities."1 Since then, she has employed a variety of materials and approaches, working in both two and three dimensions, on a scale that ranges from the intimate to the monumental, and in the gallery setting as well as in public spaces. Throughout this evolution, the notion of repetitive action as meditative act has remained integral to her process of making intricately crafted, hand-wrought objects. With her emphasis on materiality and beauty, the seductiveness of form, and the effects of surface pattern and reflected color, she hopes to infuse the act of looking with a similarly meditative state of mind. In other words, as she wrote in 1998, "I have intentionally tried to involve the viewer in the aspect of art making I find most compelling: physical engagement."2

Richmond audiences were introduced to Blum's work in March 2004, when the group exhibition North American Ceramic Sculpture Now traveled to the Hand Workshop Art Center from the World Ceramic Center in Icheon, Korea. She was represented in that show by a wall-mounted, multipart piece entitled Lotus Pond, consisting of voluminous porcelain-and-bronze blossoms as large as 40 inches in diameter. As in her several other recent "flower walls" – one of which, cast in resin and aluminum, now occupies a 77-foot-long expanse in the Seattle airport – Blum's exaggerated shifts in scale and consequent transformations of delicate, ethereal things into hardy, voluptuous forms impart to her subject matter a robust, pop-inflected, and often eroticized presence.

Last fall, thanks in part to support from the Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation's Creative Fellowship Program, the center hosted Blum as an artist-in-residence. Working virtually nonstop over six weeks, she produced hundreds of cast china-clay forms that later were assembled into 90 large butterflies. In this ambitious body of new work, the artist's ongoing exploration of pattern dovetails with other long-held interests: she adopted the raised and incised geometric patterns embellishing her butterfly wings from the dazzling designs that so beautifully bedeck Islamic architecture. For Blum, this traditional, culturally specific use of pattern epitomizes its essence. "Building on the work of Greek mathematicians," she notes, "Islam transformed geometry into an artistic form honoring the religious imperative to avoid visual representation while also expressing a spiritual connection through abstraction."3

Blum cites as a formative experience her visit to the Dome of the Rock, the famous Islamic shrine in Jerusalem, during the year she spent in Israel as a teenager. Among the Dome's many marvels is the patterned faience tile work that adorns its exterior walls, commissioned in the 16th century by Suleyman the Magnificent, the same Ottoman sultan who made Istanbul the center of Islamic civilization. Growing up in what she describes as the architecturally undistinguished town of Champaign, Illinois, Blum had never imagined, much less encountered, anything so stupendous.

Her fascination with pattern is evident as well in the many works on paper also featured in this exhibition. Drawing became for Blum an increasingly important activity after she first moved to New York from Seattle seven years ago, when she wanted to pursue something less cumbersome than making sculpture. Initially, she produced a large group of densely patterned, optically vibrant works by superimposing in each piece three or four layers of transparent acetate bearing geometric, floral, and biomorphic motifs. (One of these drawings was used as the design on a series of cast-iron manhole covers commissioned for the city of Seattle.) Soon thereafter, inspired by the etchings illustrating an early 20th-century scientific textbook, Blum began an ongoing series of ink-on-paper drawings that portray a remarkably fecund array of botanical images. These obsessively detailed, meticulously rendered Botanicals, rhythmically punctuated with the whirling apertures created by a Spirograph and the branching patterns of Chinese plum blossoms, have since led to much larger, more complex compositions. In them, Blum achieves on a single sheet of paper the same mesmerizing, multilayered effect of her earlier acetate drawings. This approach also informs her recent monoprints, in which long wavelike swathes of saturated color are overlaid with veritable galaxies of patterned elements.

At the Hand Workshop Art Center, Blum has created her own wondrous environment. As her conception of this installation has progressed, she has ultimately allowed her swarm of butterflies to overtake a whole gallery. Haloed by the subtle glow of reflected color, which emanates from the painted surfaces of the backs of the butterfly wings, these loosely clustered, overlapping forms drift upward across the surrounding walls. Unglazed and chalky-white, the front surfaces of the butterflies give them a ghostly, apparitional appearance. Although quieter and more understated than anything Blum has thus far produced, they bring to mind her Flower Wall I (2000-01), another monochromatic piece comprised of many outsized porcelain flowers, all glazed near-white. Drained of color, these surfaces act as a kind of tabula rasa awaiting the imprint of the viewer's imagination. In the earlier work, variations in form and contour prompt comparisons between component parts and underscore the assertive distinctiveness of each. In Butterflies, by contrast, the repetition of form and pattern subsumes the singularity of any one element, shifting attention to the overall effect and impact of the entire room-sized installation.

With this installation, Blum has more closely intertwined the various strands making up her artistic practice. By merging aspects of her two and three-dimensional works, as she comments in the following conversation, she intends to create a particular kind of experience for the viewer that exploits more fully the visceral effects of pattern. "A verb rather than a noun experience" is how Blum terms her intention, indicating that her concept of material presence has evolved to accommodate expanded terms of engagement.

Notes

1 Slide lecture at the Hand Workshop Art Center, November 2004.

2 As quoted in Kate Wagle, "Votive Influences: Four American Artists," in Per Grazia Ricevuta (Rome: Paolo Malagrino Editore, 2002), p. 248.

3 Unpublished artist's statement, 2004.