Two Artists Find Inspiration In Isolation

It’s a seaside pavilion, framing an island off the Connecticut coast. But the way the image is cast, it doesn’t allow for simple idyll. It’s peaceful, sure, but also lonely. There’s the tranquility of isolation, but also a sense of insecurity. It is, said photographer Marjorie Gillette Wolfe, ​“evocative of what I went through” during the depths of the Covid-19 shutdown, as she found herself alone and outside in ​“protective spaces, but in another sense, not protective at all.”

Pavilion appears in ​“Exposed Secrets, Secrets Exposed,” a show of Wolfe’s and painter Kate Henderson’s work, up now at Kehler Liddell Gallery in Westville through Oct. 17. Though Wolfe is a photographer and Henderson a painter, the works of the two artists connect in multiple ways: in a penchant for bold shapes and textures, an eye toward strong composition, and a response to a year and a half spent figuring out how to make the best of a pandemic-ridden situation.

Until reopening began earlier this year, Wolfe said that she spent most of the pandemic alone; she was by herself ​“all the time. I just made the most of it. I did not want this to be a waste of time.” She started by going through older photographs she had done that hadn’t yet found a home in previous shows. Among them was a picture of the outside wall of a house in Spain with an unusual brick formation on it. Her eye was drawn to it. At first it looked like it might be a chimney gone awry, but on closer inspection, she saw that it was actually a piece of an old arch that the builder had incorporated into the house. The arch seemed like an exposed secret. From there, Wolfe had her theme, which allowed her to return to the general principles that guided her practice.

“It’s still a combination of photographs of beautiful places and humor,” she said.

A few of the photographs circled around another theme as well: climate change. One photograph of a beach in Martha’s Vineyard was, for Wolfe, a document of erosion. She found echoes of that theme in the shape of an enormous pile of salt she came across in New Haven — as well as a photograph of a seawall, because ​“you know the reason for a seawall,” she said.

But many of the images in the show ​“just have to do with beauty,” Wolfe added — things she saw on her daily walks during the shutdown. She took pictures of newspapers decomposing on the sidewalks because people didn’t pick them up during the early days of the pandemic when it was believed the virus could be easily transmitted by touch. But she also trained her lens on the earth, the sky, the water, as she had in the past.

“There’s no question that I love the landscape and love seeing new things in it,” she said. ​“But everything looked dark during Covid.”

The pandemic also affected Henderson’s art practice, sometimes quite overtly. One piece, titled The Ones We Lost, was painted early in the shutdown. ​“Covid seeps into our psyche as well as our physicality,” she said. Throw Me a Rope, she explained, was on one level a product of her psyche during the pandemic. ​“It wasn’t a long tunnel for me,” she said. ​“It seemed to me to be a tall ceiling, crowded in by the walls.”

Henderson said that she usually starts her paintings from drawings, but ​“I end up tearing it up and rearranging it.” Then she adds paint, moving the image in new directions. ​“You don’t see what the original drawing was, but there’s always an echo of the original intention,” she said. In another way, however, the painting begins to take over. ​“What does the painting want?” she finds herself asking. ​“There’s an inner spark that you can unlock in the painting, and you have to find that.”

At the same time, Henderson found inspiration in a book called The Creative Fire: Myths and Stories About the Cycles of Creativity, by Clarissa Pinkola Estes. She was particularly struck by Estes’s account of the Greek myth of Persephone, who is kidnapped by Hades to become queen of the underworld. She is allowed to return to the surface for part of the year, but must in time return to the realm she rules with Hades. The cycle of Persephone’s presence and absence affects her mother, Demeter, goddess of the harvest, and to the Greeks, it explained the changing of the seasons from periods of barrenness to periods of fertility.

A common take on the myth — especially because modern readers often (erroneously) map ideas of the Christian Hell onto the Greek underworld — is that Persephone is miserable while in Hades and only happy when she returns to the surface. But Estes, Henderson said, points out that while Persephone may have been kidnapped, while she is in the underworld, she is its queen. ​“She blossomed there,” Henderson said. And in the cycle of her year, ​“she is living two lives.” Her time in the underworld, in Henderson’s reader of Estes, is one of regeneration and gathering strength, ​“and then it springs forward again.”

Estes likened the story of Persephone to the creative process in a way that Henderson identified with. In contrast to some creative ethics that suggest developing a daily practice, Henderson connected to the idea of going through a natural cycle of abundant creation and then regrouping, resting.

“The spark of creativity gets lost sometimes,” Henderson said — and that’s okay. Especially during the pandemic, which isn’t over, we are allowed to have patience with ourselves, to find times to work and times to rest, times to build and create, and times to recuperate and renew.

“Exposed Secrets, Secrets Exposed” runs at Kehler Liddell Gallery, 873 Whalley Ave., through Oct. 17. Visit the gallery’s website for hours and more information.