I enjoy looking closely at comparatively small areas of ornamentation.
It’s the kind of thing that feels like it’s spatially completed, not just added to, by you standing in front of it. You find a sense of belonging within yourself to the point it’s almost as though you’re looking at something of your own self that was already there in front of you.
I quite enjoyed the few times I’ve wandered through an area at The Met in New York City of visible storage that includes a lot of furniture pieces and other household goods from centuries past in the United States. I think about the people who lived among their pieces of furniture, these pieces, and who relied on them. I don’t know them, and I never will, but these people somehow feel like they continue through these touchpoints with which they interacted.
I imagine their personhood and the personhood I start thinking about in other contexts as linked to a cosmic or at least overarching force that you find in the tiniest of moments. Across space and across time and across the memory and imagination of things, moments of sensory perception meet in the lived journey of an individual.
A key facet of these defining, sensory connections — brought to mind by artworks from Elise Ferguson that I saw in a recent exhibition at SHRINE, a gallery in New York — is that they work out. All of this really does meet.
I myself am not the places in which I exist, but I feel like they wrap around my trek through them, extending themselves. Their contours become part of my own definition and my own perspective.
And then I myself feel as though I am extending with these animated places, prompted towards directional winds within the simplicity of my own self that transcend my physical particularities but are still… me. I become part of my environment, both of us reaching together.
In Ferguson’s emphatic artworks, she presents intricate, visual curvatures both limited and more expansive that are built out with repeating, stacked lines. The imagery stays decidedly and distinctly flat, though you still get the sense that the visuals bear the internal weight of occupying some real space. The art pieces are crafted specifically with pigmented plaster, adding bulk.
And the visual repetition sinks within its own creative power, offering such an expanse within it. You get into the spread of illumination that you feel starting to percolate upwards through the visual linkages of this art and you find… so much. You can really linger in it.
Yet, the tantalizing space you feel in this art is peripheral — almost-space, almost there.
It reminds me of how memories visually flicker at the back of my awareness, sometimes flashing more dramatically, sometimes taking me — again — into their midst. In Ferguson’s art, the fleeting becomes the indefinitely lasting, and at least temporarily, the total.
The way I think about the imagery, the repeating lines essentially remain as such — lines. In the overarching, visual assemblages within these pieces, the sense of driven line still leads my impression. It’s less a firm holding of central space and more a sense of connection and real linkage across it. It’s distinct, and in the art pieces’ consistency, they hold us there, in a stasis of the illumination of the barely seen.
The artworks chart space as a series of connections, even connections entirely limited to their own confines but nonetheless active and expressive.
Ferguson’s visuals both start and continue to look distinctly outwards and beyond themselves, but there’s a surprising feeling of closeness, honestly, as I’ve been thinking back to the pieces. Perhaps it’s a function of how insistently close the lines snaking across these surfaces remain.
They’re so confident and assured in their closeness. It’s a matter of fact and a matter of transference, really.
The lines in their insistence feel like they’re holding in their intimacy an answer that was drawn from a grander, outside expanse on par with the spiritual concept of the heavens, or at least the beyond.
Ferguson drew some inspiration for her visuals from devotionally inclined imagery from the Shaker community, and I really feel reverential indications of grandiosity here, in Ferguson’s own art. Specifically, SHRINE’s press release discussing this show cites “An Emblem of the Heavenly Sphere,” a drawing by Polly Collins from 1854.
And here, the beyond — even just the above and the connecting: it’s all no longer so distant.
The expanse becomes the close, the loving, the responsive, and the signpost. With the enveloping textures and the particularly rich areas of repeated color in Ferguson’s art, I think at the same time of apocalyptic light growing behind the clouds and tiles — both from actual kitchens and places I’ve never actually been but just imagine. And the balance is impressive, honestly.
The show closed last weekend, but I look forward to more from Elise Ferguson and SHRINE. Best of wishes to both!
