Life Forms: Grow is an exhibition of four Maine-based artists. It features work by Jackie Brown, Leah Gauthier, Elaine K. Ng, and Ashley Page, who constitute a subset of the larger Life Forms collective of twelve artists. The collective is an experiment in artistic community building. Through a series of exhibitions over four years (2023 – 2027), each in a different location and featuring a different selection of four artists, the group aims to deepen relationships, discover new connections through their creative work, and share in conversation with the public. The Life Forms: Grow exhibition examines the show’s title state of becoming, investigating growth’s many facets. Earthly concerns permeate the work as its artists grapple with present missteps that have heralded the Anthropocene. The exhibition asks: What will we take forward as we grow into our future? Each artist locates an answer by recognizing and honoring that which makes us.
Elaine K. Ng has created a selection of textile works utilizing kalamkari (also known as chintz) techniques for the exhibition. A laborious process originating in India that reached heights of global popularity in 17th- and 18th-centuries during the Mughal dynasty, chintz creation requires careful stages of extracting dyes, applying mordants (metallic compounds that allow pigments to attach to cloth) and resists, and various fabric treatments. Written records of the technique strike many practitioners as incomplete or difficult to replicate. Historic accounts often contain omissions brought on by a lack of dialogue between recorders and practitioners. Ng recognizes this schism as a microcosm of the academic oversights that permeate many records of artistic knowledge. What began for Ng as a quest to better understand a creative process has morphed into a means of honoring the knowledge held by artists. Ng’s installation recognizes artists’ growth through the internalization of embodied knowledge. To highlight the individuals who hold this knowledge, Ng foregrounds a cloud motif in her kalamkaris, derived from the background clouds the artist saw in her research. Ng honors and carries forward this individuation in her work, paying homage to how pursuing artistic knowledge fosters intellectual growth.
Leah Gauthier’s tapestry discs also involve clouds, representing the celestial phenomena at various times of day under a mix of stratospheric conditions. Through these daises, the artist references how climate change is colloquially seen as nebulous, occurring in weather patterns invisible and transient, and not considered to be of significant quotidian consequence to those on the ground. Gauthier brings these realities down to land, displaying her circular panels alongside stacked plant works. Together with the succulent towers, Gauthier’s work considers growth through both anthropocentric and more-than-human lenses. Synthesized by the artist’s hands, composed of animal-derived materials, and cradling plant life, the towers act as allegories for the entirety of the Archaea biological domain. The resulting combination unites the atmosphere and those affected by its conditions in the audience’s perceptual field. Gauthier urges a future where conditions that spur growth for all life are equally prioritized. Her works argue that planning for a changing climate must be accompanied by a foregrounding of our interdependent future.
Jackie Brown is similarly interested in growth as experienced in soil and on rock. The longue durée of geologic timescales informs her work, leading the artist to explore themes of accumulation and erosion. Brown’s works are constructed through the artist’s experiments with a ceramic 3D printer, infusing a sense of play into her igneous-reminiscent forms. Large works are comprised of fragile stacked plateaus, while Brown’s smaller objects drip, lean, coil, and crawl. They at once recall the terrestrial yet approach the otherworldly uncanny. Brown contemplates the extra-planetary forces of our tectonic past, present, and future; her works peer into the glacial shaping of worlds both here and beyond. For Brown, growth is a force not necessarily within anthropic control; it is simultaneously beautiful, strange, and inevitable.
Ashley Page finds hope in the chaos and unpredictability of growth. The artist’s Black Seeds have been compared to “wombs,” gently cradling the growth of new life.1 Page says she purposefully focuses on seed pods, in addition to small floral forms, for their themes of dispersal and transformation. Wind — an outside force — carries seeds and their pods to hitherto unknown locales, yet they take root and thrive wherever they land. They are armored but porous, allowing in what is needed to grow while retaining protective exteriors that permit becoming. These allusions to the resilience and malleability of life and identity are underscored in the four portals which offer alternate realities and futures. Against a painted black backdrop, the artist’s doorways draw images from various sources, including Page’s personal life and the recent Los Angeles fires. The portals are punctuated by environmental thresholds of coal, rocks, driftwood, shells, and sand. These gateways provide a choice of where to take root. They remind us that no matter where seeds land, growth will be their inevitable constant.
It is of pivotal consequence that seed pods grow in clusters. They are communal, acting together, protecting one another as the wind carries them. In this way, they mimic the experiment in community that is the Life Forms collective. Collective action is key to surviving whatever future we find ourselves in. It is within community that growth is nurtured, cultivated, and sustained.