DENATURED TRUTHS / THE SCULPTURES OF KATHLEEN ELLIOT

The artist is a natural idealist who begins with form and ends with meaning. When Kathleen Elliot first began to discover herself as an artist she had an immediate interest in the use of glass to create forms reminiscent of nature itself—branches presenting leaves, flowers, and fruit, which over time coalesced into abstract forms as doppelgangers for the real objects she wished to emulate. Every artist develops a world view through their work that may not manifest in linguistic terms. However, the protracted activity of art making, developing the channels of meaning, and growing through the stages of one's discipline, makes one adroitly sensitive to the importance of a value system to accompany it. There is a fervor to the new way of thinking about how art can reflect life in these tumultuous days of political rancor. It’s been building for 20 years and is finally peaking in every corner of society. The voyage of the artist is, less and less, a pure exploration of ideas as forms, and progressively answers to issues or problems in contemporary society.

It’s been repeatedly said of Elliot that she studied the academic disciplines of philosophy, linguistics, beauty, and spirituality to amass an educated basis for her work in glass. Clarity in regard to the specific lessons gleaned within each of these disciplines would immensely accrue the degree of portent in considering the art work itself. Elliot is an adherent to the philosophy of Martin Heidegger, who proposes that objects are what they are because of how we interact with them, rather than because of some intrinsic definition. One very prevalent characteristic of Elliot’s work is its preciousness—the branches and leaves that comprise the tactile form of the sculptures have been fashioned with intent to charm the viewer. No doubt the crystalline, half transparent glass she used is meant to hint at the vulnerability of nature, its tenuous relationship to the growths of junk food that mysteriously emerge from them, transmuting the natural world into an unnatural one. Despite attempting to compel the viewer to address the dysfunction of these curious fruits, Elliot unintentionally makes them an idiosyncratic source of fascination. We want to unravel them.

In the case of her series “Questionable Foods” she specifically directed herself to recognize how a relationship to beauty and its connection to forms of organic life, creating fabricated versions of real plants, could be expanded to consider the metaphoric, and also the very real, relationship between nature, food, health, sustenance, indulgence, compulsion, and good and bad versions and ideas of food. In our contemporary society, the movement toward consumption of organic foods as a single base of health and sustenance, and the disavowal of commercially defined “fake” food items, packaged, mass produced foods.

The individual examples within Elliot’s “Questionable Foods” series all riff off the imagery of packaged foods, commercial products rather than real sustenance, with an entertainment factor to their designed exteriors. The types of art works comprising her Questionable Foods series appear in three distinct versions: as her own previous sculptures utilizing commercially designed additions as a form of virus; as food objects covered in a skin of advertisements; and two-dimensional models of ‘his & hers’ gingerbread cookies with commercials for a direct exterior. In one case she builds a large strawberry plastered with advertising images for commercial foodstuffs, as if to say, you want indulgence but here is real sugar. Clearly, the dynamic between appetite and real hunger is central to the experience she is metaphorically presenting. The fracture between appearance and essence has remained constant from the beginning of her career and continues to inform its making even as she departs from a dynamic of beauty alone. The quandary presented in the Questionable Foods series is not solely premised upon the obvious, but upon a polemic between nature and culture. This polemic not only concerns the issues immediately at hand, but the premise of art-making itself. Nature is essence; it is not only the fruit on the branch but any realization of it as a means of embodying its symbolic power. The branch is sensual and palpably real, even as a glass form it retains much of its appeal; reduced to a sensuous facsimile it serves to provide us with an experience only art can give. Culture, in artistic terms, refers to those manifestations of commonly held beliefs that are projected upon the blank canvas, both a subject matter and a material in and of itself, and in this case because of their commercial manifestations, imposing an illusory quality of value that is merely greed in disguise. Eat this food! Drink this soda! It will make you younger, prettier, richer! It entices with the concept of transformation but ultimately adds little of real value to our daily existence. The transmission of values that originated in myth and legend have become cheapened, and metaphorically foreshortened, by their service to agendas disadvantageous to both health and truth. The artist looks back into the depths of nature, encouraging mystery.