ARTIST STATEMENT
My work is about obsessiveness and obsession. I repeat minor movements with a blade to draw objects that are indicative of natural forms such as leaves, feathers, barnacles, and seaweed. Sewing, layering, and adding lights allow the work to operate across three dimensions, using both shadows and vacancies as marks.
I am astounded by the resiliency of the forest: the endless process of reproduction, mutation, and evolution. Even after we trample it, cut it all down, build from and over it, new seeds scatter, vines reach. My work explores the way nature reclaims the built environment. Who or what will fill the vacancies after we have passed through—emerge from the wreckage and colonize, metastasize, assert control?
Tyvek provides protection—covering, wrapping, and insulation for the home. I use it because, although it mimics the fragility of paper, it is durable enough to weave, sew, and cut into drawings that stretch from ceiling to floor: creating dense “living walls.” I use both the negative and positive pieces—weaving the off-cuts into thickets or clusters, collecting all of the tiny pieces & suspending them to mimic swarms or clouds / an omen for the augur—that moment when starlings blackout the sun.
More photographs by © Summer J. Hart
Summer J. Hart is an interdisciplinary artist from Maine, living in the Hudson Valley, New York. Her written and visual narratives are influenced by folklore, superstition, divination, and forgotten territories reclaimed by nature. Her poetry appears in Northern New England Review, Third Point Press and E-Verse Radio. Her mixed-media installations have been featured in galleries including Pen + Brush, NYC, Gitana Rosa Gallery at Paterson Art Factory, Paterson, NJ, and LeMieux Galleries, New Orleans, LA. She is a member of the Listuguj Mi’gmaq First Nation.
Artist’s website: www.summerjhart.com
Instagram: @summerjhart_studio or https://www.instagram.com/summerjhart/
