Nude not Naked: Angiola Churchill’s Site Specific Installations
By Jeanne Wilkinson
Similarly, there is a feeling of skin in her work. Within the glassine sheets of Brambles I see layers not necessarily vegetal or human or even animal, but skin nonetheless, maybe a skin of life, of the mind, fragile flesh full of dark lines winding around like some long-lost language of the soul. In some places the surface is marred with spots, perhaps of some stray liquid, an accident, a pocked place, not deliberate but left there uncorrected like a spot or wrinkle speaking of age and wear and experience. The edges of the glassine have been cut with a scissors, leaving a jagged edge whose imperfection shows the motion of the hand as it pushes down the length of the material, stroke after stroke, a human rhythm, imperfect, implacable, getting the job done.
In Waterfall, a work of many pure white strands of tissue paper situated on the main gallery wall, there is a sense not of tedium or standardization. Rather, each piece of twisted tissue is both the thing itself and something apart, micro- and macro-cosmic, each strand a spiral of life, DNA vortexes creating a large whiteness like a fall of water caught in its essential form.
This piece is seamlessly installed and is redolent of the repetitive motions of ‘women’s work.’ I met a woman at the opening, who helped make this piece, and it had obviously been a labor of love. This is important to stress: Churchill speaks about her labors as creating a trance-like state, a concept poorly understood in a world still ruled by the harsh stresses and unrelenting pace of the Industrial Revolution.
With a kind of modern arrogance stamped on us by our liberation from the land and from handwork, we see repetitive labor as mind-dulling and soul-crushing. The hyperactive stringencies of efficiency have turned human labor into factory tyranny. But if made free it from that dogma, work can return rhythm to human life and it becomes another animal entirely. This is perhaps hard to imagine. We pity anyone churning butter, pounding corn or weaving cloth. But far from being mindless, this kind of work can create a meditative, Zen-like state that is profound rather than demeaning. Though not quite the same as yogic meditation, because bodily motion keeps the mind grounded, the thought processes resulting from this hand/body/mind unification are shapely, profound and rooted deeply in our common creature-ness. (This is not to be confused with the desperate labors of those mired in poverty; nor is it the same as the self-absorbed repetitions of the vanity workout.)
Churchill’s work with its bride-whites, delicacy and focus on
"woman’s work" is sometimes spoken of as feminine. But instead of evoking a polarized sense of femaleness that connotes "not male," I see it as something more universal and ethereal, something involving trust, open to anyone who steps beyond a cluttered ego to comprehend it’s clarity and strength.
Stream evokes a crystalline quality where interlocking facets shimmer and dance. The triptychs of prints are slightly angled out from the wall so they become like set of waves, a trio of tonal whites which take on subtleties of light and shadow, like the intricacies of lace done from a modernist perspective. To look at Lake after Stream is to be jarred by its dissonance, the extremes of dark and light laid out so simply, so vibrantly. Both of these works seem to train the eye to see more clearly.
Churchill’s work, in some respects, is rooted in the traditions of modernism but all along she maintained her own vision. During a far more sexist time, she became the first full-time female art professor at NYU, and as her will shone then, so it shines now. She has brought her female sensibility to fruition, and like Seeds, the window installation in this current exhibition at the Tenri Cultural Institute, her ideas and objects have borne fruit. Angiola Churchill’s artwork is subtle, strong, and unafraid.
