2017 Six Week Spotlight
Robin Grace & Dana Van Burgh
Art making
into the unknown I am pulled
the ground is soft, hard
shifting
i stumble, spiral
i rise
laughing joy.
I like that the landscape is always changing.
Walking across Mud Bay life pulses. The push of wind. Day-glow green sea lettuce clings on rock. Lichen creep over Spruce and weathered bone.
Incoming tides swallow the mudflats. I am driven to return to my studio on the beach.
I am a self-taught artist, combining knitting and objects found in the natural world. I am attracted to swirling shape and color. The waves fold over red and golden seaweed, the creek is dark and murky.
During college years in Greenwich Village, I frequently stopped to peer in the windows of a high end boutique featuring hand knitted dresses. The owners, like characters from an Edward Gorey book, strolled the neighborhood in sexy lace spiraling to their ankles, hair piled carelessly, looking straight ahead. Like a tattoo, this memory has never left me.
My excursions in knitting have evolved from conventionally structured garments to lichen shaped fragments. Struck by the beauty and wisdom in organic matter, I create knitting to intermingle and merge. Work is play but sometimes misery. Pieces come together and fall apart. I have also pulled them free, tossed them in the air and felt connected with the new.
In this collection, I have tried to capture bits of flow and texture observed in nature. Knitting organic fibers with metal wire serve a dual purpose providing resilience and sensual form.
Robin Grace
My love of photography started in my father’s photo Dark Room when I was a child. Watching the magic of a photo appearing in the developing liquid captivated me. Thus I began the search for those magic images.
Through my camera lens, I have focused on the details of nature which has given me an appreciation of how intricate nature is. The smaller details expand to larger details, becoming infinite.
One day when Robin and I were walking the bay, we realized we had a mutual fascination for the textures and flow of nature. We decided then to collaborate on an artistic endeavor. Working independently on our pieces, we were struck with our similarities of what we produced in our work. And so… here is the show.
Dana Van Burgh