Held In Common
Color as common ground. Memory as material.
Held in Common is my part of Chroma: A Chromatic Collaboration, a 2019 project by four members of the Hana Kark Collective: encaustic artist Caryl St. Ama, painter Margaret Lazzari, mixed-media artist Nancy Kay Turner, and me. Using color as a commonality, we each worked independently to create 25 birch plywood panels, 6” x 6” each, for every primary and secondary color.
Color gave the four of us a common thread, and I held to it. When my first piece, Writ in Water, didn't fit, I changed course and let the work follow memory: sea glass gathered at our family cottage, a book that belonged to my grandfather, and the words I found in it. Each series grew out of the one before, so the six colors read as one story unfolding.
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Blue
Indigo, and a first piece that didn’t fit.
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Orange
Learning new stitches and tactile rhythm.
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Green
A box of sea glass and the summers it holds.
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Red
My grandfather's book, gessoed to leave only selected words.
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Yellow
Small tales that run across sequential panels.
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Purple
2020, and the words gathered into stories, one to a panel.