October Issue 1999
Contemporary Baskets Chowan College
Creating Baskets is serious art. Just ask award-winning artist, James Dewar,Jr. For nearly twenty years he has been constructing basketry art forms using fibers and found objects in nature.
Chowan College Green Hall Gallery in Murfreesboro, NC, will be showing the exhibit titled, Contemporary Baskets, a collection of Dewar's fiber constructs using the basket form through Oct. 17, 1999.
To Dewar, his creations go beyond the traditional basket form. "It is construction using fiber that incorporates tying, binding, layering and weaving. And sometimes it is the weaving of ideas, rather than the fiber."
Illustrating that precept, one of the pieces reflects first a weaving of the mind. Having grown up on a tobacco farm in Harnett County, NC, Dewar reaches back to his roots and includes tied and woven tobacco sticks in an installation that will be featured in the exhibition. Another piece contains the remains of a fence that serves as the armature for the woven fiber.
Typically Dewar partners fiber and other organic shapes - vines, twigs, leaves, mushrooms, branches. It's an extension of his work. Dewar is an Associate Professor of Biology at Chowan College. He considers his profession a great influence in what he does in art. "Some of my pieces look almost as though life had been breathed into them."
Dewar has won numerous awards for his work. He recalls one of the first shows he was in, a highly-recognized sculpture exhibit near Lenoir, NC. Placing two basketry art forms amid the imposing more traditional sculptures, he felt a bit daunted. However, he received two awards, one for each piece. That was when he realized his work could be discerned from the critic's perspective.
His awards come as no surprise to Joseph Haas, former president of the Tri-State Sculptors Association and proud owner of several of Dewar's pieces. "He (Dewar) has a very inquiring, aesthetic mind and that shows in the tremendous varied of organic elements he uses." Haas, a Raleigh, NC, sculptor who fuses inorganic elements into art, believes Dewar's "anti-baskets" process has more to do with the textures and the effects of the materials and how they come together to form a comtempletive piece, leaving function and purpose to the viewer.
Dewar began his informal training when he was five. Under the watchful eye of his mother, whenever she sat with her quilt squares, he constructed his own patchwork. He also was influenced by the binding and tying of the farm's main bounty, tobacco. After a few formal art courses at Chowan College, capriciously, he, took a basket-making workshop at John C. Campbell Folk School in Brasstown, NC. At the end of the two-week period, prolifically he had constructed 14 baskets. "Some of my creations were a blend of honeysuckle and fiber. My instructor sensed I viewed basketry as an art form that stretched beyond the craftsmanship."
Two years later he attended a basket design workshop in San Jose, CA. Joining forces with his muse, the instructor beckoned Dewar to move away from controlled construction. That uncommon direction stays with him today as he continues to weave and layer ideas into art concepts.
For additional information check our NC Institutional Gallery
listings or call Dr. Haig David-West, Chair, Department of the
Visual Arts 252/398-6306 or e-mail him at (westh@chowan.edu).
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