Caroline Lathan-Stiefel
Visual Artist
Website www.carolinelathanstiefel.net
Recipient of a 2005-06 Visual Artist Grant from the Creative
Capital Foundation, Caroline
Lathan-Stiefel has
exhibited at several galleries in Atlanta, as well as the FE Gallery,
Pittsburgh, the Islip Art Museum, East Islip, NY, and the New Jersey
State Museum. She is the recipient of a New Jersey State Council on the
Arts Grant in Sculpture and a Print and Paper Fellowship from the
Rutgers Center for Innovative Print and Paper. From 1998-2003 she was
Artist-in-Residence in New Jersey elementary schools. Lathan-Stiefel
received her MFA in Painting from the Maine College of Art.
Whorl
My project Whorl was initially
shown last summer at The
Atlanta
Contemporary Art Center. Most of the following images are of the
work
as it appeared at Articule in
Montreal last January. Upon entering the
gallery, you could first look through a small window to see the
installation. The idea of connected systems “run amok” is central to my
thinking when I am making drawings and installations. I think of this
project as a kind of drawing in space with proliferating, sprawling
forms that grow outwards in all directions. The word whorl means a form
that coils or spirals. It can also be the pattern of a fingerprint
which says something to me about the trace of touch. Many of the
structures in the installation are abstract and cellular, but embedded
within them are forms that suggest interior and exterior architecture,
marine biology, and domestic objects.
In June of 2004, I began
translating some of the following two-dimensional drawings into
three-dimensional sections of what would become Whorl. Continuing
to work from multiple drawings, I employed a great deal of
improvisation as the installation grew as well. I was not only
interested in integrating actual forms from the drawings, but also in
maintaining a similar prevalence of line. Many of the forms in the
piece remain in a state of flux. While some fabric-covered shapes are
sewn together, others are simply tacked together with straight pins.
These processes, along with commonplace craft materials such as pipe
cleaners and yarn, suggest a provisional quality. In Montreal, I
integrated lighting into the installation for the first time. I wanted
to find lighting that would complement the installations’ modest
materials and its linear character. I would like the installation to
evoke a somewhat absurd Herculean task--one that is both obsessive and
impossible to complete. In fact I plan to continue this project once
again by taking sections of the existing work and refashioning them
into very different forms for an installation that will be shown at
Suyama Space in Seattle next May. The word whorl sounds like the word
world. To me, the “world” of my installation has a somewhat “undersea”
feeling. I would like the viewer’s experience walking into the
installation to be an immersive one—perhaps a bit disorienting—as one
feels when swimming deep in the ocean.
Caroline Lathan-Stiefel