Room for a View
Exhibition dates: February 25 - March 25, 2022, S. Tucker Cooke Gallery, Owen Hall, UNC Asheville
Opening Reception: Thursday, February 24 from 6 - 8 pm
Artist lecture and Gallery Viewing: March 17th at 7 - 9 pm
What Lies Beneath (Megaphone component), repurposed telephone wire and hair dryer, outlet timer, steel; hand knotted, distressed, constructed/welded , 2020
photo credit: Rob Allen
Shrink, wool fiber, cotton thread and rope, repurposed funnel and measuring stick, graphite; wet felted, free-motion machine stitched, colored in the lines , 2019
photo credit: Steve Mann
Lisa Klakulak as seen through the storm window screen woven from her hair, titled The Weather Inside
photo credit: Sarah Davey
Cornered, wool fiber, repurposed table, grater, sifter, whisk, food processor blade, funnel; wet felted, 2019
photo credit: Rob Allen
Vent, wool fiber, repurposed fabric scissors and curtain rod; wet felted, cut , 2019
photo credit: Steve Mann
Artist Statement
Room for a View is an exploration of the correlation between brain and body memory of familial and familiar social experiences and the nature of the wet felting process, namely its reduction of airspace. Delving into this questioning through the format of mixed media sculpture, the work in this exhibition commenced in 2017, reached a fervour during a self-imposed retreat to Nova Scotia from August 2018-March 2020 to pursue my masters degree, with additional pieces completed over the past 2 years.
Focusing on wool’s qualities that allow for sound absorption, smothering fire and holding moisture and its response to being agitated in the felting process: to shrink and contort, I began to see my felting practice as an abstraction of what I have felt. The porosity of materials and processes that modify its internal space are micro-environments that provoke memories of my lived social experiences. Similarly, I see the dramatic forms and underlying causes of geologic transformation, also as social dynamics, yet on a grander scale. These big ideas drove my relocation to be adjacent to the Bay of Fundy in Nova Scotia, home to the most extreme tidal change in the world, otherwise known to me as the largest cover up and reveal of what lies beneath.
In this theatre, eighteen abstracted figurations and social reenactments have been constructed with found and referenced objects using qualities and measures of space to allude to psychosomatic states of being. In addition to using the density of felt as a representation of human feeling, plaster is integrated for its conventional use to fix through filling holes and covering imperfections, cast to demonstrate repetitive experience, as well as for its release of heat in its hardening process. Therefore, both plaster and metal perform as a conduit for temper and as a demarcation of how things should be, that is, until more space and movement is introduced in the sculptures as a symbol of relief.
The Gallery is staged as if it were the mind/body. The pieces that embody constrictive and dense memory are confined to a smaller area representing the head while pieces representing the sympathetic nervous systems flight reaction are positioned along the spinal column. The remaining works that have more space within their structure, are positioned at a greater distance from the other works and are arranged in a linear format representing the extension of limbs, movement and action.
Biography
Lisa Klakulak is a fiber-based artist and educator who has maintained a home and studio for her business, STRONGFELT, in Asheville, NC since 2006. Klakulak works the medium of wool into figurative sculpture and body adornment through intensifying processes of wet felting, natural dyeing and free-motion machine embroidery. Her work has been featured widely in print publications, fine craft exhibitions and acknowledged through American Craft Council Awards of Excellence. With a reputation for technical precision and its opposite, wanderlust, her career and aesthetic have been marked by worldwide travel to conduct workshops. Completing a Master’s Degree in Sculpture in 2020 at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, Klakulak’s recent work investigates the correlation of concepts of space in material, environments and the psyche.