|
Taking
Notes:
Exploring Meaning through Drawing
Margaret
Neill [Bio]
November 1 -
December 27 2001
Central Library Lobby Gallery
 Language
isn’t always what it appears to be. It is fluid and continues to evolve
as it seeks to define the unknown. Some words change their meaning while
others become irrelevant or obsolete. Drawing has become
for this artist a way of maintaining a sense of self during periods
of fundamental change. In an attempt to connect the personal to the
social, Taking Notes uses drawing as a means to imagine a pictorial
language, a way of writing toward the unknown and in the process learning
to accept difference.
By using
words and their meaning as jumping off point, I have chosen three ways
to interpret the transformation of meaning through drawing: works on
paper, a book drawing and video. I use the
build up of calligraphic marks on a surface to express various approaches
to one idea.
Every mark is an opportunity to travel to an unknown pictorial space.
These drawings are made in the process of exploring meaning, which once
revealed, is then covered up and changed into something new.
In the
dictionary piece, ink drawings are created on over 1500 pages of the
now obsolete Webster’s 9th New Collegiate Dictionary. Words and their
meaning have become obscured and made inaccessible by the drawings,
in the way that language can sometimes hide instead of articulate what
we intend to say. It was made
as a metaphor to rethink sometimes outmoded belief systems.
The video drawing chooses the library itself as its main character.
A library is where information of all sorts is made accessible to a
wide public. I attempt to portray the library as a vehicle of knowledge
and the organizer of ideas. While pathways to accessibility may change
over time, it is still up to the individual to make sense of it. With Taking
Notes, drawing becomes one person’s attempt to come to terms
with the unknown.
|
(Click to enlarge)
|
|
Margaret
Neill earned a MFA degree at Brooklyn College in 1984. She has
exhibited her work in commercial and not for profit settings.
Including the Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art, the Czech
Republic at the Monastery Plazy and the Mixed Media Gallery
of Block Island, RI.
Since
1994, Margaret has been affiliated with the Kentler International
Drawing Space where she made large scale charcoal drawings directly
on the walls and has been a regular participant in shows there
ever since.
In
Feb. 2000 she was Artist in Residence at Hiram College. Most
recently, Neill was accepted as visiting instructor during Winter
Term 20001 at Middlebury College in Vermont.
In addition to works on paper and painting, she works in a variety
of formats, from wall drawings to book drawings, to a limited
edition book of photographs, entitled, COMMON PLACE: Earth Sea
Sky.
|
|
)
)
)