Same Voice/Different Song
September 6 to October 12, 2013

Review: The Free Press, October, 2013
Lissa Hunter at CRAFT Gallery

by Britta Konaun

Among young artists it is now relatively common to forego specific tags like "painter" or "sculptor," as they tend to engage in what medium and technique best serves their purpose; and contemporary artists in general are increasingly comfortable crossing over the traditional line into craft and combining approaches from both paths of training. That this also works in the opposite direction, from craft to so-called fine art, and not just for the physically young, is wonderfully illuminated by a showing of Lissa Hunter’s recent work at Rockland's CRAFT Gallery.

With degrees in painting and textiles, Hunter (b. 1945) started out as a weaver, then turned toward basketry, but has essentially always been a mixed-media artist. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including a Master Craft Artist Award from the Maine Crafts Association in 2009, and her work has been reviewed in many national craft magazines and featured in several survey publications. A number of important museums collect her work, among them the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Museum of Arts and Design.

Throughout her career, Hunter has stretched her expressive scope and proven sensitive to her materials' properties. Compositionally, most of her pieces combine a supporting or framing structure with one or more three-dimensional objects. The latter evoke relics from an ancient time that appreciated nature as its spiritual source of comfort and power. Quiet and contemplative, Hunter’s pieces are the result of much soul-searching, research, planning, and time-consuming execution.

It is truly inspiring to see how the creative impulse knows no material boundaries in Hunter's case. Her CRAFT Gallery show includes a broad scope of media—works on paper and wood, as well as clay and porcelain forms—held together by a predominance of drawing, which Hunter only relatively recently discovered as a central form of expression. There is only one piece, "Autumn Sea," that in its tight design harks back to older work and remains outside the conversation the other pieces seem to engage in as motifs, themes and ideas bounce around between pieces of the same or different medium, recurring and changing in the process.

Four large charcoal drawings on gessoed paper depict flowers, plants, and fern fronds in strongly silhouetted contrast. Attached to each are squares of gessoed wood in black, deep frames that feature continuations of the motifs in charcoal as well, but varnished to a gloss as if painted. Although the drawings’ scale remains the same, the raised images feel as if zoomed into focus. They also force the viewer to look at each work straight on to take in the entire image.

A similar concept governs four pieces combining shelves of smooth stones, vessels and bottles with figurative stoppers, all made of clay, with related two-dimensional images. Overall palettes range from warm ochre and earth tones to cool whites and greys, suggesting associations with land and air. The still-life objects bear marks and residues of lines and vague inscriptions, evocative of an ancient origin. In addition, their edges are darkened as if by age and use, or as if drawn with volumetric shading. The charcoal images on the panels above each arrangement repeat the motif of the stoppers or suggest a new theme. Thus in "Come Winter" the leaves blown sideways atop the clay bottle twirl through a nondescript sky on the panel. In “Coming Home” a bird apparently is about to land on the vessels beneath. These seasonal narratives of nature pay close attention to the movement of air in a medium of the earth.

Porcelain is the medium for a collection of small, vertical vessels listed as tumblers. Built from slabs into imperfect shapes, they ask to be held, crossing over into the functional. Scraped and incised, embossed and painted, their varied surfaces feature abstract patterns or stylized birds and other natural elements. I felt myself drawn to these pieces because of the freedom and playfulness of their forms and designs.

The tumblers relate to "Forest for Trees," a larger assemblage of columnar vessels decorated with abstracted trees and perched atop a shelf decorated with indecipherable writing. Like one continuous exploration, similar surface and design treatments adorn two tall, undulating vases as well, while a single charcoal drawing expands on the image of a flock of birds. Hunter is clearly fascinated by making, getting to know new materials, and learning new techniques. In the process, she transforms all material she touches into her own formal and representational vocabulary, which is inspired by her observation of nature, noting seasonal changes like a diarist. It is utterly exciting to feel the sense of experimentation and discovery in this collection of her work—being young and adventuresome is clearly not a question of age at all.

Britta Konau writes a biweekly column, art current, for The Free Press