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January Issue
2010
The Center for
Craft, Creativity & Design in Hendersonville, NC, Features
Works by Loren Schwerd
The Center for Craft, Creativity & Design in Hendersonville,
NC, is pleased to announce the exhibit, Loren Schwerd: Mourning
Portrait, on view from Jan 15 through Mar. 26, 2010. Schwerd
creates sculptures using hair to commemorate the losses of those
who lived in the Ninth Ward in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina.
This solo exhibit features a series of work by sculptor and mixed media artist Loren Schwerd, currently an Assistant Professor of Sculpture at Louisiana State University.
Mourning Portrait
began as a series
of memorials to the communities of New Orleans that were devastated
by the flooding which followed Hurricane Katrina. Working from
photographs Schwerd took of vacant houses from the Ninth Ward
neighborhood, she creates metal armatures that act as the frameworks
for weaving the hair into portraits of these homes. These commemorative
objects are made from human hair extensions of the type commonly
used by African-American women that the artist found outside the
St. Claude Beauty Supply.
The portraits draw on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century tradition
of hairwork, in which family members or artisans would fashion
the hair of the deceased into intricate jewelry and other objects
as symbols of death and rebirth. This series venerates the city's
losses, both individual and collective. Hair acts as the central
metaphor to evoke a sense of intimacy and absence, and speaks
to the racial politics that have paralyzed the city's recovery
effort.
In the two years that
Schwerd has been researching and executing this work, the series
has expanded into a larger body of objects and images that utilize
a broader range of techniques and provide a richer context for
the houses, such as sculptures, shaped from found wigs, that combine
imagery from Victorian hair wreaths with contemporary, sculptural,
African-American hair fashions.
Schwerd received her BFA in Studio Art from Tulane University
in New Orleans in 1993, and her MFA in Sculpture from Syracuse
University in New York in 1999. She is currently an Assistant
Professor of Sculpture at the Louisiana State University School
of Art in Baton Rouge and was an instructor and visiting Assistant
Professor at the College of Charleston from 1999 to 2005.
Schwerd offers the following about her work: "My artistic
practice includes site-related installations, wearable art, video
and sculptures that are inspired and shaped by the impulse to
transform familiar objects into metaphorical constructions and
paradoxical observations. I investigate the multiple associations
that are present in a material, site, image, or gesture, seeking
to identify and enhance points of connection and tension between
these suggestions. I favor found materials that contribute their
function, cultural value, and a trace of their mysterious personal
history to my design. All of my projects demonstrate a dedication
to craft. I employ basic methods of connection such as tying,
weaving, and stitching, imbuing my work with a feminine sensibility,
and whose meticulous labor evokes a sense of time, memory, and
obsession. Permeating all of my creative endeavors is a slightly
dark humor and a fascination with awkward beauty."
Schwerd's work has been exhibited widely. Select venues include
the Urban Institute for Contemporary Art in Grand Rapids, MI;
Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art at the College of Charleston;
Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art in Winston-Salem, NC;
Mobile Museum of Art, AL; Penland School of Crafts in North Carolina;
Louisiana Artworks in New Orleans; and the Dana Women Artists
Series at Rutgers in New Brunswick, NJ.
For further information
check our NC Institutional Gallery listings, call the Center at
828/890-2050 or visit (www.craftcreativitydesign.org).
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