Poke

In my first memories of making art, I am at my aunt’s house in Cleveland: making little poke-marks on the wall and braiding the fringe on her brocade sofa. Decades later, here I am: still marking up surfaces and playing with fabric. Almost all the work was done by poking a single needle into bits and pieces of felt, a process that causes me to marvel as hundreds of tiny holes gather to create a whole.”

Read More

“Underlying this series are the twin themes of “there but for the grace of God go I” and “the meek shall inherit the earth.” These themes have been present in my work for decades now, as I have long held a reverence for the special beauty of the worn, the spent, the frayed, the tattered, threadbare and bruised. In the past, this reverence manifest as paintings of rag-puppets in broken-down industrial settings. I love to juxtapose the unexpected and, for the paintings, I studied the techniques of old Dutch masters to impart a luminous beauty to the desolate scenes of shabby figures bending over their various ramps, chutes, and gears. Then, to create the POKE series, I asked myself: “If the puppets were in an art-factory, what would their art look like?”

It’s this question that led me to the new works offered in POKE. In moving from two to three dimensions, I was excited to add a tactile, spatial, and somehow “real world” component to my previous work—as though the puppets themselves had stepped out of the paintings and created the felt-works while I was sleeping. I haven’t been sleeping, though! I’ve been wool-gathering, dyeing, tearing, wadding, and—yes—poking away. Through it all, my goal has been to evoke a quality of ironic nostalgia, a mixture of pathos and tenderness that I hope is palpable in the softness and shabbiness of these strange shapes that seemed to will their own way through my fingers.”

Frances Lerner 2023

Menu
$