2021 Visual Poem: Here is An Iron . . .
Installation View, 12 x 14 feet, in process
Comprised of handmade artworks alongside found objects and including original poetry, my visual poem walls are the culmination of years of inquiry and experimentation with sustained mining of personal history for inspiration. In addition to the wall here, I envision other iterations of these visual poem walls with works connected through theme and color to address questions about various concepts. They can be commissioned and created for specific sites.
The current body of work is a visual poem wall entitled “Here is an Iron I Found for You at the Flea Market.” I am the fourth generation of an immigrant family who moved in order to survive, carrying handed-down, cherished craft and food traditions with them as identifiers. Common themes in my studio practice are feminism, what is commonly known as “women’s work” though not gender specific, interiority, poetics, and ephemerality. My practice has always been varied and ranged as needed from realism to abstraction; my work is concept driven, and I use the materials and processes that I need for the concept. “Here is an iron . . . “ is about the body, and what the body touches, eats, bears, gives and receives. At present it is installed in process on one of my studio walls measuring 14 feet high x 12 feet wide, with plans to expand it and one day install it in public settings. This type of installation of my work is my dream show that I have been working towards ever since I recognized that one set style and one chosen medium was limiting the full expression of my concepts. Intuitively arranging the various artworks I had completed on the wall, I watched these objects suddenly begin to talk to each other, revealing their meanings through connection rather than difference. The title of this new work, “Here is an Iron I Found for You at the Flea Market” refers to the generosity and love embedded in gifts that evidence how we project the body of the beloved onto objects, pointing to our innate ability to understand the world through its interconnectedness. Specifically, it references an iron from the time when they were without electric cords and made of heavy cast iron given to me by a family member who knows my passion for the beauty of antique and vintage domestic tools with their distressed patinas of history.
Recurring ideas about the handed down, the handmade and the hand itself are prioritized in “Here is an Iron . . . “ I first experienced an appreciation of the handmade from makers in my family, particularly the women who knitted, tatted, crocheted, embroidered, baked and cooked, taking their time to make fine handmade objects that all bore the print of the maker and the obvious signs of hours and hours of careful, patient craft. Even the recipes, handed down to me, an avid baker, were handwritten, with the fingerprints and notations of the pastry maker preserved as a valued part of the inheritance. Along with the recipes came stories: stories of strong ancestors who survived hardships with imagination and persistence, tools that as an artist I count among my most essential.
Presence and interiority are guiding themes, pointing to that place called home in body and spirit, as well as in the world. The individual works are the skin, flesh and bone with the spaces between functioning not as pauses but holding everything together — in essence, a body of work about the connecting tissue, both physically and in artistic process. Where we are light inside and where we are dark is a driving force behind my formal choices, including where we disappear at the edges, as evidenced by a figure in oil on canvas whose edges do exactly that. Nature as body and home is also an integral part of the work, particularly the nomenclature mother as applied to earth. The limited palette is another intentional choice depicting color that is commonly called “neutrals,” but is no such thing.
History is created through the wearing of our bodies and garments over time, ripping the cloth and unraveling the threads, telling our stories so well that we often prefer clothes full of holes over new. How the transient body itself is also uniquely eroded and stretched — by the wearer as well as by forces upon it — is why I include objects such as a vintage bathing costume worn repeatedly by an ancestor until every wrinkle recreates her contours with haunting precision. Personal items and realist depictions such as skin-like handwritten recipe pages, a detailed oil portrait on canvas, a threadbare dress dummy on a cast iron stand, among others are counterpoints to moments of pure abstraction in painting and drawing. This tension between the vast and the intimate, between open-ended abstraction and the depiction of things of the world, is connected by theme and color. This is the story of “Here is an Iron . . . “ as written by an “intimist,” a word coined for me by a mentor who understood my obsession with the small moment. Family ties and food and the methodology of creating are intertwined, whether it’s recipes or instinct that is being followed and honored. The handed down is passed from one to another in order to preserve, and in my own way as an artist, I do my part to continue the thread with my visual poems. In the end, as with life, the work is about the space I leave for others.
Nan Ring 2021