“Word Salad” is the title of artist Anna Warfield’s text-based fiber arts, dual exhibition presented by the Downtown Artist Cellar in partnership with the St. Lawrence County Arts Council.
Her “Pink” work will open at the Creative Spirit Community Arts Center, 6 Raymond St., Potsdam, today at 5 p.m.
Her “Blue” work will be featured at the DAC, 410 East Main St., Malone, with an opening reception Friday at 5 p.m. Both exhibitions are free, open to the public and will remain on view through March 5.
“Bringing visiting artists like Anna Warfield to our region is incredibly important,” Erica Kelso, executive director of SLC Arts, said in a press release. “These opportunities allow our community to connect with artists working at a high level, while fostering meaningful dialogue, inspiration and cultural exchange. We’re excited to welcome Anna and share her work with audiences in both Malone and Potsdam.”
HAND-SPUN
Outside of her studio practice, Warfield teaches other artists and will start teaching a class at SUNY Binghamton this semester. She holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts in visual arts and Bachelor of Science in communications from Cornell University.
Her recent solo exhibitions include the Rockwell Museum and the Everson Museum. She is the recipient of multiple New York State Council on the Arts grants, residencies and juried awards.
“I am predominantly a visual artist and a writer, a poet as well. I grew up in a very creative household that was very nurturing of the arts,” she said. “My mom did a lot scenic design work, so it was always kind of around, and I was always in it.”
Warfield’s practice bridges tactile soft sculpture and poetic language, creating intimate, thoughtful works that explore care, vulnerability and the ways one holds memory and meaning. Her multidisciplinary approach invites viewers to slow down and engage with art that is both visually compelling and emotionally resonant, according to a press release.
“They are both now very present in my practice of the work I currently make is original poems that I write, and I turn them into fabric sculptures but are usually suspended in space,” she said.
Warfield resides in Binghamton but grew up in Whitney Point, a small Southern Tier town.
“There was a certain point that I realized somewhere in undergrad that my words, like my voice, somehow didn’t resonate quite the same as other voices in rooms. I felt very unheard, where my ideas didn’t matter when I was sharing in seminar type situations or even in social context, so I felt very silenced and quite muted,” she said.
“In an attempt to regain control of my voice, I started to incorporate text into my work. So I just started writing things, and I just knew that if I was going to have a group in a critique situation, which is very much a part of undergraduate process focused on my work, I wanted them to be actually focused on my words — to sit with them and chew on them for a period of time to sort of validate the things I was thinking about or experiencing without skipping over that. So that’s where it started.
“Ironically, when I first wanted to work with text and voice and communication, I figured the artist book or a book format would be the ideal way to do that, and some of my first artist’s books were completely textless. I wasn’t even able to make myself put words into them, so we’ve come a long way. and now I work solely with words.”
Her soft-sculptural poetry is a nod back to her upbringing in Whitney Point.
“Being raised in a very creative, hands-on household, not just my mom, but also my aunts, were very involved in fiber arts,” Warfield said.
“One of my aunts is a pretty prolific quilter. I was raised in a very matriarchal setting, showing there were these incredible skills that were easy to access around me and resources for it. My mom was a big sewer, like, made a lot of costumes my whole life for mostly myself, but also for theater productions and what not, and was an embroiderer too. So I had access to machines and sewing from an early age.”
PROCESS
Typically, Warfield’s process starts with writing, which she records in documents containing words she’s interested in working with.
“From there, I’m dying fabric,” she said. “I usually work with muslin, which is kind of the equivalent of newsprint or scrap paper but in fabric. It’s cheap and it takes up dye really will because I’m typically working with a mostly cotton variety. I dye the work, usually because it becomes sort of my painterly practice. It’s, like, the once chance beyond sewing and cutting that I have influence over the color of the piece right and the form.
“Then I’m calculating how much yardage I need per letter per word, cutting out every single letter. You need two sides for every letter, so it’s double that. I sew the perimeters of each letter, I invert them and stuff them with Poly-fil, which is what you would stuff a stuffed animal with. I thread them up to a singular, circular point or a dowel rod, and that is what I attach to the ceiling. So it’s mostly fabric, except for whatever the hanging mechanism is.”
WORD SALAD
Warfield hasn’t had to purchase muslin for years. People give it to her from long abandoned projects after having purchased it in bulk.
“A lot of the themes in my work are kind of heavy, so I’m presenting them in this soft, inviting way,” she said. “And I like to have humor kind of woven in as well. I look for titles and pairings that kind of made sense.
“So this set of shows is completely text-based work of mine. I have pieces that are not text involved at all, so it just seems like it made sense that this would to be the one we talked about — all words.
“If you get into the text, there’s, like, this fine tipping point that I’m interested in where it’s about something. It’s about extreme clarity, in a lot of cases, but it’s also about the tipping point between what is clear and what is not clear, finding understanding but also finding misunderstanding.
“I think ‘Word Salad’ kind of encapsulates that, where I have my associations with a few things that I am putting into this, but you have your own lived experiences that are contributing to our interpretation and how you’re seeing this work and applying the words that I am representing to you. It’s kind of a mix of these things and acknowledging that.”
The show will include two sculptures, “Softer” and “Harder,” from a set titled “Carnal Directions.”
Works in the exhibition include 2D wall pieces, large hanging sculptures and glass pieces Warfield made last year at the Corning Museum of Glass.
“I had a residency with them. It was wrapped into a commission project that I was doing at the Rockwell Museum, which is also in Corning,” Warfield said. “They do partnerships, and I was commissioned to do a piece through the Rockwell Museum, and while that piece was installed, I spent the week at the Corning Museum of Glass working with their professional gaffers that make some things in glass.
“We were experimenting a lot, and some nice pieces came out of it. So those are what I’m going to be showing.”