ARTISTS' TALK: JULY 5 > 4:00PM
GALLERY HOP/OPENING: JULY 5 > 7-10

ADELE MATTERN

BIO
Adele Mattern is about to receive her MFA in sculpture from The Ohio State University. Prior to returning to school, she worked as a clothing and textile designer in New York and Boston.

Immediately before moving to Columbus, Adele lived for three years in rural Ohio. The time she spent in that landscape brought to mind for her the terrain and rhythms of her Mennonite grandmother in rural Pennsylvania. In "Lest I Be Quite Forgotten," Adele finds a range of ways to explore her connection to both of those worlds simultaneously.

The act of self-memorializing, of leaving intentional traces meant to speak to an imagined future, figures centrally in these works. Many of these pieces focus on means and materials that have traditionally been available to those seeking to preserve traces of their own identities. Such forms of making may seeem particularly fragile or ephemeral. Sometimes, Adele works with materials that transform those ways of making and appear to offer a greater sense of permanence and solidity. These pieces question our expectations and assumptions about what sorts of materials and making best speak to the future or represent the past. This work uses present acts of making to give voice to a past, and to seek connections between memory and history.

STATEMENT

Lest I Be Quite Forgotten

My restless thread wanders. Details of an isolated landscape emerge as I move the needle in and out of the cloth. Country terrain recalls that of my Mennonite grandmother. Long ago "turkey red" thread maps the way. Current geography intersects a partially remembered past. Colors historically inaccurate; embroidered words flare bright red, flame orange, wicked green. Follow the thread dyed as if by antifreeze, my name an acid yellow. It describes a particular story fully.

She wore frilled silk dresses brightly printed to grange dances before "joining church" and dressing "plain." Scandalous. Dress of hide becomes a hard shell as water evaporates into air. Breath struggles to conform to the shape. Lettered bricks stack instructions. Clumps of dough hold fast. Still-life with chair, light glinting on gold. Leaves deflated. World shrinks to fit on kitchen table. Creamy skin, now dried, peels back like wallpaper. Short stitches, red marks, collect on white linen, history forming then unraveling as thread pulls through. Skin, stretched over hoop, remains.

Names and dates copied from linens collected; "Mary Landis 1825, Elizabeth, Salome Moyer, Maria Kratz, M.K., Jacob Ratzel..." She, young, unmarried, embroiders her name, or that of fiancee intended, on a towel hung loop over peg to be seen from the parlor chair. Linen not meant to be touched.

Now, though, press palest pink. Here, girls voicing the great and great, great grandmothers.