EMBERS: JULIA BLAND

Julia Bland makes artworks that exist somewhere in the space between painting, sculpture, and tapestry. Her experimental process incorporates stitching, weaving, knotting, dying, and even burning her materials, creating sublime abstractions of geometric compositions. This exhibition, Bland’s first at Tayloe Piggott Gallery, also features oil and canvas collages, as well as Bland’s drawings, which help her think through her ideas, functioning as a kind of map with different marks indicating the process or material she intends to engage. A digital catalog will accompany this exhibition with an essay by Glenn Adamson, which is excerpted below.

Early in Bland’s career, after training as a painter at Rhode Island School of Design and before learning to weave, she spent time in Morocco, where she studied Islamic art and Sufism. As Adamson writes, “She absorbed the dense concentrations of pattern in people’s homes there, and for a time apprenticed herself to a carver of intricately decorated wooden doors. This saturation in craft reinforced experiences she’d had growing up in Palo Alto, California, where she had her first exposures to art through family friends who probably would qualify as flower children. One of them taught her how to make jewelry, and another gave her a loom that she still uses today.” Bland incorporates her loom as one of many tools—alongside her trusty scissors, and, of course, her hands—to transform fabric into a transporting tableau. Bland’s experience in Morocco has embedded itself in her work, which often contains intricate geometric patterns that recall ornate Islamic architecture and images of snakes, a sign of death and rebirth in Sufism. Other forms in her paint-tapestry hybrids, meanwhile, resemble the suspension bridges of New York—a reminder that majesty can come from the spiritual world, the natural world, and the urban world all the same.

Adamson observes, “The total effect is electrifying. Standing before the immense wall hanging, you are enmeshed in the internal oscillations of its “active surface” (to borrow a term from Op Art). The composition, while essentially symmetrical, is laced with tactical misalignments. Colors are usually reflected from one side to the other, but here and there, they shift unexpectedly. The work has the dynamic balance of a yin yang symbol, as if seen through a kaleidoscope.” Hints of familiar objects emerge through the layers of fabric and yarn. Adamson continues, “These multiple, elusive images are compacted within the pictorial field, much like the numerals in Jasper Johns’ celebrated 0 Through 9 series: a palimpsest of layers, with none taking precedence.”

Allusions to her process and remnants of her materials are always present in Bland’s work. She observes that these vestiges “give you information about how the work came together. There are the technical and formal aspects of the technique, and then there is the social naming of it.” As Adamson observes, “Craft is typically encountered either as culturally-encoded, perhaps folkish, perhaps kitschy; conversely, it may be seen as a culturally-neutral modus operandi, simply a way of arriving at form. Bland refuses this false opposition. When she uses a technique, she takes on its full range of association and potential, absorbing it whole. This is the impulse that drives her practice forward.”