Eliza Shaw Valk

Lives and works in New Haven, CT, USA

Artist statement

In large-scale installations, by massing and reordering mundane, often rejected, materials, my work explores structure and improvisation, the materials acting as registrations of mechanical processes and the mechanism for capturing transitory events. Drawings to prepare new installations take on new questions, rapidly developed in a long series of experimental studies. These in turn inform textile designs that then ask for looser norms and quieter frameworks in a series of watercolor drawings. Over and over, round and round, each iteration builds on and overlaps the next, solving and posing old and new questions. Cycling through drawing, textiles, and sculpture, I start with the rhythms and imposed order of a field, while wrestling with the particular and idiosyncratic. This initial framework then shifts — diminishing or disappearing, emboldened or exaggerated — as color, texture, volume and density compete like zealous and rapacious plants sprawling from the rows in which seeds were sown. Overrunning some, neck and neck with others, new patterns are tested, suggested or rejected, tangling the conceits and presumptions that blind or bind us. Pattern and deviation, intuitive response, echo and dissonance, syncopation and surprise, entrance, immersion and exit — these frictions and thrummings are explored on paper and three-dimensional form. How to interrupt the assumptions that hold us back—distanced from ourselves, where we are, and with each other? How to open space for...

Artwork