OFFSCREEN 2024: Booth E.10

"In late 2023, Louise Lawler and I engaged in a brief dialogue via email about her work WAR IS TERROR, 2001/2003. I was asking her permission to collage a reproduction of her work into my own composition entitled Women & Fiction, War is Terror, 2024. It's inclusion was an act of reverence for Lawler and her work, as well as its subject: a photograph by Julia Margaret Cameron of Julia Jackson Stephen, mother of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell. Lawler had captured the portrait in Yvon Lambert's home outside Avignon, where it hangs over Fortuny fabric.

Lawler's striking composition of textile and image aligned with my own interests and research. I had recently photographed another Cameron portrait of Julia Jackson Stephen, amongst the extensive Julia Margaret Cameron holdings in the Photography Department of the Victoria & Albert Museum, London, as well as their collection of Isabel Agnes Cowper's early photographs of Lace. My capture of these historic photographic collections, and related textile collections at the Baltimore Museum of Art, and the Costume Institute, New York along with engagements with contemporary media artists such as Lawler, and Joan Jonas are foundational to the development of my series Lace Interlace, which explores the ongoing and evolving innovations of female practitioners in photography, textiles, and technologies of the past and present."

"The lace images included in Lace Interlace and Women & Fiction, War is Terror were captured from an album of photographs taken by Isabel Agnes Cowper. Cowper was the first female official museum photographer of the Victoria & Albert Museum. Working at the museum from 1868-1891, Cowper captured hundreds of objects and was particularly accomplished in capturing images of textiles and lace. Cowper's images of lace were also used in widely circulated educational publications and followed a tradition of pattern books created by and for women since the 1600s. Published at the start of the industrialization of textile production, Cowper's indexical and industrious views of lace present a complex narrative. Pedagogical yet delicately rendered their exacting detail is effective in empowering the work of the unattributed female creators of the lace pictured, yet their educational function in an empirical and encyclopedic institution, is a complex one that raises questions about museum practices and photography's role in codifying roles, and definitions of what is and isn't art.

Originally an act of collection and preservation, when I photographed Cowper's album page from an angle and through a digital camera's lens, it becomes something more "virtual" and of the imagination. Printed as a silver gelatin print the image of lace and the dark velvet plane on which it was originally captured in the 19th century becomes undulating and fugitive- and more a hybrid of past and present photographic technologies. The imaged page becomes a threshold upon which its history as it is resonant within my own pictorial lineage is explored."

"Upon learning about the origins of this image in my work, Lawler sent me her work, A Part Of The Picture, 1989/1994, also included in this presentation. The photograph depicts a moisture indicator atop lace taken at the Isabel Stuart Gardener museum in 1989. The functional museum device at its center reveals an intelligent self-reflexivity on behalf of Lawler. The apparatus of the museum, and the care and technicalities involved in the keeping of collections is elevated to subject. This unseen labor of care often carried out by women in the predominantly female-led fields of conservation and curation, is valued and formalized in Lawler's insightful work.

Through shared interests in and explorations of the public and private collections that house the works, of Cameron, Cowper, and other significant woman of the past, our photographic works collectively evoke an expanded appreciation of women's roles in the evolution of museological practices and photographic reproduction. The life and after life of images, is central to this presentation at OFFSCREEN and my practice overall." 

Photography's foundations and its early practitioners continue to inform contemporary society's ideas of expression, communication and community. The installation at OFFSCREEN presents a poetic arrangement of images and ideas that encourage careful observation of details within the compositions and between the artworks on view. A conversation is presented between practices of the past, and contemporary photographic works encouraging a more collective understanding of art historical pasts and futures.

The background image of Soeurs, 2024, was captured by VanDerBeek at the Joseph and Anni Albers Archive in 2018. It is of an Anni Albers drawing for a print made in 1968. As a preeminent artist working in textiles, Albers work and writings in and on weaving, continue to be impactful to many artists including Lousie Lawler, who sent VanDerBeek an article about Albers when discussing the Lace Interlace project.

Albers's use of the grid as a dynamic field, was an important aspect of VanDerBeek's interest in capturing this composition and pairing it with the 18th c. lace from the Cone collection. In each, the hand of the creator is seen via the intricate detail and the mirroring of form, that is further expanded with its mirrored surface. Overall the combination of image, reflection, and relief strives for a visual experience that is continually shifting and resonant of multiple times and cultures- from the Pre-Columbian influences on Albers's drawing, the fine hand work of anonymous women who made the lace in pre-modern Europe, to the Cone Sisters who collected and preserved the lace for posterity in Baltimore. The advanced UV relief print of the historic lace also addresses the potential future life of textiles and collections. In an act of recreation, the lace is formed through image and digital printing to establish a new form.