GAYLE CRITES
Artist Statement
Spring 2008

Cross Pollination
The modern world is changing through globalization in business protocol, international economics, social values and the formation of our identities. This phenomenon impacted my artwork. Through foreign travel studying handmade papers, my sensibilities began to tune into a very different aesthetic from that which my studies of the history of Western art had created over a lifetime.

Japanese paper, for example, is strong, transparent and versatile in the way it absorbs wet media. I have used silk dye, instead of traditional watercolor, to paint on it. Material called “kapa”, or “tapa”, is a type of paper/cloth made of hand-pounded mulberry bark made for centuries throughout Polynesia, including Hawaii. I have incorporated a Tongan woman’s “tapa”, which I acquired with the English translation help of her niece. Paper is made by hand of bamboo in Mexico, and has subtle color variations which appear as coffee or tea stains within some of my pieces. Camel hair weavings from Iraq form their own transparent vail of neutrality.

Given that the world is moving toward a global community and cultural identities are slowly dissolving, I became curious to explore ways of making art as global “collaborations”. The title of this body of work was spawned from this line of thinking as “Cross Pollination”. What do cultural identities mean, and what function do they have, in world where diverse populations embrace a New World citizenship without geographic boundaries?

I began by collecting handmade materials, created in ways possibly soon to be culturally obsolete, by indigenous artisans in different corners of the world. By collaging them in my contemporary pieces, I realized that my process of acquiring supplies from foreign worlds and combining them to create a new artwork is my artistic version of global outsourcing. The work honors the beauty, rarity and time-consuming aesthetic of its team of creators.

I have coined the term “meditative drawing” to describe the intricate brush marks I have superimposed over my paintings on the handmade papers. The drawings represent the complexities of world cultures and their individual citizens connected by the internet and cell phones. Underneath their abstract and instant communication systems, what human values and sensibilities are important to uphold?