Kitty Wales: “Drift” on view at Speedwell Contemporary
Jorge S. Arango Maine Sunday Telegram. May 26, 2024
Kitty Wales, “Drift,” 2024 Photo by Dave Clough Photography
TELLING STORIES
The through-line in the sculptural work of Belfast-based Kitty Wales – whether it springs from studying reef sharks in the Bahamas, feral goats in Scotland or creating the wall sculptures featured in “Drift” – is narrative. Wales works with repurposed and discarded materials, which automatically imbue her sculptures with a sense of time and memory, of things that have lived a life of purpose and meaning, and that may also have circuitous connections to other things (the environment, our sense of our past, even to human figures we might not perceive when we first look at them).
The work at Speedwell arises from travels to Mexico, where Wales encountered ancient Mayan and Aztec codices. These pictograms chronicled bloodlines, sacred rituals, agricultural practices, daily events and more, all within a palette of colors that made an impression on Wales. They were narrative in the sense that they told stories of everyday life, and they also made connections to pantheistic beliefs of Mesoamerican civilizations and their deep link to the land and its creatures.
On her return to Maine, Wales started making connections, too – between these codices and memories of her grandfather, a mining engineer who had spent time in Mexico. The results are wall sculptures, some site-specific to Speedwell, that reverberate with a spirit of times and lives past. In several, she incorporates objects, such as a dented coffee pot and cup, that belonged to her grandfather. Though their meaning is personal, the viewer needn’t know a thing about what they reference.
Instead, what these sculptures can conjure is the idea that they might have been found in an old, abandoned house and assembled in a way that reanimates the memories they hold. Chair parts, rolling pins and funnels, a picture frame, a cabinet’s decorative detail, a wheel, a bell, a milk jar … all of these might have been used and lovingly handled at one time by the residents of this house. The way Wales links them, equally lovingly, relates a narrative one can loosely read from left to right, a story with elements of their path in the world, and also of the way they came together in this time.
Individual elements aren’t necessarily original objects but, rather, recreations of them. Wales covers everything in paper and paper pulp then obsessively infuses the components with individual life by layering thousands of colored-pencil marks, finally yielding a palette drawn from the codices, but also reminding us of school art projects where we obscured a picture with black then scraped it away to reveal the original image as if seen through a veil. This process simultaneously evokes something childlike and a heightened sense of age and time passing.
The works can also call to mind the jerry-rigged contraptions of a Hayao Miyazaki animated film or the Tin Man from the Wizard of Oz. Often, too, there is a figure hidden within the form. The title piece, for instance, began with the idea of a reclining figure, with the leftmost group of objects standing in for a head and the body stretching out toward the right. The assemblages are enchanting, as well as mind-blowingly complex. It’s a winning combination.
Jorge S. Arango has written about art, design and architecture for over 35 years. He lives in Portland. He can be reached at: jorge@jsarango.com
