Brian Slattery Photo
The carved faces of immigrants. A sea turtle diving beneath the waves. A quilt full of mythological animals.
As part of Artspace’s City-Wide Open Studios, The Eli Whitney Barn on Whitney Avenue once again opened its doors to artists who took over the old wooden space and transformed it, for Saturday and Sunday, into a gallery filled with art that was suffused with memory.
Sara McGrimley.
Along with resident artist Susan Clinard, visiting artists Alexis Brown, Dave Coon, Maura Galante, Clymenza Hawkins, Martha Lewis, Briah Luckey, Kiara Matos, Sara McGrimley, and Martha Lewis entertained a steady stream of visitors Saturday.
Many of the works that McGrimley had brought to the barn from her Cheshire studio were monoprints, which, as the name suggests, were prints “that can’t be repeated.” McGrimley has been a printmaker for about 15 years.
“I took it in college and fell in love with it,” she said. “There’s always a little element of surprise to it…. You have an idea in your head, but there’s always a little bit of magic involved.”
Upon further questioning, it emerged that allowing for that surprise was part of the process, too. She could experiment and experiment, reduce the instances of chance in making the final product. But keeping it a little more spontaneous was part of the fun.
“Part of it is the perfectionist in me,” she said. “You have to let go of it. The medium gets to have a say, which is good for me.”
One of McGrimley’s prints mimicked, to great effect, the light through ocean waves as seen underwater. Farther down the piece, and farther down in the depths of the water, the green shape of a turtle appeared to be moving away from the viewer. This image, McGrimley said, was inspired by her first time snorkeling, in Hawaii.
“We followed a turtle,” she said, “and all of a sudden I realized I couldn’t see anything but the turtle and the blue water around me.”
That the texture of the ink on the paper could suggest light through water hadn’t gone unnoticed, and was one of the pleasures of printmaking. “Once you’ve made it work for one thing,” McGrimley said, she sees “how you apply it to something else.”
Left a little less to chance was a printing block of a mountain range, done in strong, solid color. Unlike the specific memory of chasing a turtle off the coast of Hawaii, these mountains weren’t modeled on a specific range of peaks; they were more archetypal mountains, tapping into McGrimley’s love of hiking and being outdoors — something she said she found herself doing not quite as much of as in the past. The mountains signaled her desire to return, “that longing to get back out there,” she said.
Martha Lewis, at left.
Meanwhile, in the loft of the barn, Martha Lewis was exhibiting a work that she had been working on literally for most of her life. It was a quilt made of pieces of fabric, some of which dated back to her childhood, just learning how to embroider (she embroiders, knits, and sews to this day). “I used to cry when I couldn’t thread my needle,” she said. Many of her embroidery project were “things from mythology — monsters and gods.”
As Lewis looked over the quilt, memories returned to her. Some of the pieces of fabric were from pillows from her youth. Others were from curtains. One was a piece from a “bathing suit of a girl I admired.” The girl had given her the suit. A paisley pattern was from an article of clothing from a boyfriend in college. “I loved that shirt and I took it from him,” she said.
There were also fabric pieces from the 1920s and 1930s, from the fabric collections of relatives in the generation above her.
She carried around the fabric for years and “at some point” — perhaps in college — “I started putting it together,” she said. At first she sewed them together without much of an overall plan. Over the years, as the quilt has grown and assumed an overall space, “I’ve become a little more self-conscious about what pieces go with what.”
Lewis’s work connects her with her past, and with the past of her family. It was suggested that its tactile nature perhaps made it more effective than a photo album, as it might be easier to conjure the memories attached to it because it appealed to more than one sense.
Lewis agreed. “I like the idea of sleeping under it,” she said.