Soft lighting fills the Hoffman Gallery and pale purple lettering carefully written in a steady hand decorates the white walls. “Being a Porous Boundary” considers the self-made and imposed boundaries we interact with.
A-B Projects, a program exploring ceramic art and the surrounding community, and Lewis & Clark co-present this spectacular winter exhibit, featuring ceramic and paper sculptures and colossal paintings by multimedia artist Catherine Fairbanks, paired seamlessly with poetry written by award winning poet and educator Catherine Barnett.
Presenting the viewers themselves as porous boundaries, this exhibition encourages us to consider how we are linked with strangers, friends, family and the discomfort which often transpires as our porosity allows grief, loneliness and separation into our worlds.
“We construct and reconstruct boundaries in order to protect ourselves, to relate to others, to move into and through the world, and for the world to move around and through us. We are, ourselves, volumes of porous boundaries,” the laminated artists’ statement outlines. “There is pleasure and joy in porosity, in connection; there can be deep discomfort when we lose sight of ourselves, of each other, or when there is a loss so great that grief obliterates (or, perhaps, vastly expands) our boundaries; and there is generative possibility in separation, in the common human experience of loneliness.”
Three large paintings grace the walls of the space in shades of purples, blues and browns. The first I came upon evoked in my mind a vivacious marshland with a gray sky hung low overhead, allowing filtered light to accentuate the natural curves and convexes of the landscape. Lines of paint drips run down to the button of the canvas, pooling as striped, multicolored veins, drawing the eye to the edges of the piece.
To its right, another painting is displayed, this one saturated with deep reds and blues that seamlessly melt together in many shades of purple, salmon and indigo. The fluid style of this piece made me feel as if I were watching the first light of morning upon the horizon while sitting in a cave, the colors reflecting off of stalactites and worn angles of limestone and marble. Though cavelike, there is no sense of claustrophobia or capture; the piece leaves the impression of resting to enjoy slow, meandering beams of sunlight twinged in the colors of morning.
In the center of the back rooms of the gallery are two things. There is a long display of ceramic sculptures in human forms, prostrate and connected foot-to-head with posts jutting out from their centers securing them to the earth. Beside them is a table topped with books.
Perhaps there are interpretations of the sculptures less positive than mine, but the boundaries I see between these figures allow loneliness to occur in a way that is not isolating, friendless or forsaken. Instead, the connections exist in the context of one another, wordlessly interacting in the shared space —, solitary but not abandoned. The sculptured figures are reflected in another large painting in the first room of the gallery, toward the end of the exhibit if you begin in a counterclockwise circle. The watery paint builds up pinks and beiges to show the bodies close but separate;, there is the warmth of the shared porous boundaries that connect us all.
At the back of the space, in front of a large poem written on the wall is a table with a selection of books and resources curated by faculty and staff. The table serves as a reading room, marked by a statement printed on the wall, offering visitors the chance to delve into a text that “relates to boundaries as seen through the lens of Narrative Medicine, Anthropology, History, Art and literature.”
I found the poetry to be quite striking. The hand-written quality invites the reader to come close to appreciate the simplicity of the carefully formed letters, strung together in profound and personal prose. Barnette’s poetry follows no rhyme scheme, and instead captures the reader in the world of her mind where she ponders her human experience of loneliness and the longevity of her art.
“I take issue with all the studies saying beware loneliness, avoid loneliness, it will speed your death,” she writes. “…some of us write to appease the loneliness, why else leave a mark. I was here, words say, this is what it was like, don’t forget—”
These words evoke a kind of self-love so personal, so integral to the artist’s life experience that expecting understanding from others is no longer in her realm of creativity. An acceptance of loneliness begets belonging, rejecting the judgment of solitude and allowing the quiet beauty of the human condition to flourish, to simply be.
The solitude in these pieces was not a harsh, abandoned kind of loneliness. Instead, I found a carefully-curated moment where the boundaries of thought, love, light, color, family and self became porous. The attention and adoration clear within the paintings created a feeling of synchronicity, professed in the poetry.
A line which still rings in my mind, hours after the exhibit as I write in my darkening room, candlelit and unaccompanied, is this: “back out of all this now too much for us / the moon is my mother / in a package of minutes there is this We.”
The exhibit curated by Nicole Seisler, the Associate Professor of Ceramics, opened on Nov. 19 and will be at the Hoffman Gallery until Feb. 25, 2025.
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