I am only about 4 months late with this post. Good thing I’m in charge! Our last artist resident for 2010 was Aldwyth. She is a phenomenal collage and bricolage artist based in Deer Island, SC who came to us by a lucky twist of fate. We had another wonderful collage artist from Brooklyn booked for June and she had to cancel just a few months before coming. I took Ellen on a surprise Valentines trip to Savannah and I asked our friend Mark Sloan, a frequent visitor and Director of The Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art at the College of Charleston, what we should see while there. He told us we had to see the retrospective show he curated of Aldwyth’s work at the Jepson Center. We were a tad embarrassed because the travelling show, Aldwyth: work v. / work n. - Collage and Assemblage 1991-2009 (spend some time on this site--it is amazing!), had premiered at the Ackland Art Museum in 2009 and we had missed it in our own backyard. We were absolutely blown away-we had never seen anything like this show. The work was extraordinary and Mark had done a brilliant job with the show and made it incredibly accessible. We both knew immediately that we had to have Aldwyth come to Cassilhaus.
Mark had built this narrative about Aldwyth being a reclusive 74 year-old artist who lived totally outside the art world in a tree house on an island off the coast of South Carolina. We thought getting her to come was a long shot at best. Ellen and I agreed we would play up the privacy of the place and that she could be really isolated. Mark connected us and we hit it off immediately and she enthusiastically agreed to come for a residency. We were not prepared for a gregarious, friendly, and open dynamo of a woman who knew more about art history and the art world than a room full of MOMA curators. It would appear that Mark can dabble in hyperbole on occasion. Aldwyth was like having another member of the family in the house and we had a ton of fun. Her only nod to reclusivity was that she didn’t like to be photographed.
We had learned a bit about her process at the show in Savannah but were very curious about what she might tackle during her time at Cassilhaus. Some of her past collage projects have taken years to complete. During her residency, Aldwyth embarked on a project to produce a visual representation of the 2003 Mellon Lecture series delivered by curator Kirk Varnadoe during the last few months of his life and documented in the book Pictures of Nothing. It takes its name from a quip by Hazlitt about abstract art. The series of 6 lectures covered the period of abstract art since Pollack.
To our surprise Aldwyth said she never used photocopies of anything-all of her collage work comes from original printed material. She had about 8 copies of the book and proceeded to cut them all up to pursue 3 or 4 completely different approaches to the work. Even at the end of her stay at Cassilhaus she had not yet decided on the final approach she would take with the piece. She explored chronological and thematic approaches and every day brought a new configuration of images all over the floor and walls of the artist studio.
The only requirement we have of our visiting artists is that they do one thing during their stay—a small exhibition, an artist talk or lecture, a workshop, etc.-to engage the local arts community. Aldwyth went above and beyond the call. She brought a good deal of her smaller 3D work with her to do a nice show in the gallery.
We also did our first ever collaboration with the Ackland Art Museum at UNC Chapel Hill with a conversation with Aldwyth and one of their curators as part of their Out of the Studio series.
The event also celebrated the Ackland's recent acquisition of the major Aldwyth work The World According to Zell.
The collage consists of thousands of images cut and meticulously assembled from a single volume of Zell's Encyclopedia.
We had a wonderful party after the talk and everyone got to see Aldwyth’s studio and the work in progress.
We miss Aldwyth dearly. There was so much creativity and energy in the air while she was here. She really fulfilled the aspirations of our residency program. When asked to describe her stay she left us with this:
C – casual
A – adaptable
S – sensory
S – serendipitous
I – incredible
L – leisurely
H – hospitable
A – architectonic
U – unbelievable
S – SUBLIME
--Aldwyth
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