Lightness of Being
Patty Hudak | Tuyen My Nguyen
Chiara No | Tara Thacker
June 29th - August 28th, 2021

The Pandemic brought humans into deep, mental spaces- sometimes shadow, sometimes light. Emergence from the collective trauma of the events, have brought about shifts in expectations, imaginations, and realities that we can no longer tolerate, as well as feelings of humility and powerlessness.

I turned to nature for answers to existential questions which I had not considered in decades. What I had once experienced as loneliness in nature was transforming into a form of expansive solitude. Was it real or imagined that I sensed a form of energy emitting from the plants and the trees in the woodlands that surround my home? How do I receive these messages?

Initially, I responded by painting the forms of trees, with memories of empirical sensations, such as the touch of my hand on the bark, the smell of the leaves, and the sounds of the birds and chipmunks.

The coronavirus pandemic, all around the world, upended our lives. Life may never return to normal for some of us after having lost so much. We lost time, experiences. We lost jobs, relationships. We lost people. Despite it all, some of us were afforded the opportunity to slow down, to reexamine the priorities and values most important to our lives and well-being. The speed with which contemporary life swooshes by often leaves us little time to experience the deeply important aspects of our relationships and revel in the quiescent mundaneness of life.

Beyond the stress and anxiety that was ever present, I hope we all will remain mindful of this revelation. While we may be swept up again, as swiftly as a tidal wave, in our lives, we must remember that like our breathing, although automatic, we still have the power to manipulate and slow it down, to shelter in place. When we need a moment of stillness to ground ourselves, all we need to do...is breathe.

The heretic, the midwife, the hermit, the foreigner are all historically politicized bodies once considered demons. My critical fabulations are a gateway to dismantling demons within herstory. When we start unraveling this demonology, we start empowering those who are Others—the protester, the marginalized, the disabled person, the neurodiverse—because they are not those; They are us, we are them.

The core of my own work is based in sculpture with clay being my primary material not only for it’s for tactile beauty and malleability, but also for the technical and historical challenges that come with it. It is my intention to make works that you don’t immediately associate as being ceramic. The works often appear soft or to be made of fabric rather than the hard fired surface that they are.

I am engaged in a process-oriented approach to art making, bordering on the meditative.

Repetition of form has always been a theme in my work. Each part or element serves as an architectural building block which I combine in various ways to discover how they behave visually. I want even more to make something of it, to transcend its initial existence, and create a new, unforeseen landscape. My current body of work is a series of wall works inspired by birds and the structure of their flight feathers as well as a series of “shadow drawings” which are images of the shadows my sculptures produce.

This kind of systems-thinking allows for an ethic of care that fits the intimacy of the objects created.

The blanket or shawl that was created to warm or soothe the wearer is part of an iterative process whereby the care of the earth, the sheep, the farmer, the maker and the world it will return to when its useful life is over are held as sacred aspects of the piece.