Edited Interview
with Artist Lillian Blades
By Sonia Farmer, Editor of Poinciana Press
Originally published in Lyford Cay Foundation, Inc. Newsletter
November 2009
When you come across a piece of art by Lyford Cay Foundation scholar Lillian Blades, you don’t just look over the work, you engage in a rich emotional exchange. Lillian’ assemblages—large sculptures made up of any combination of picture frames, fabric from clothing, magazine images, buttons and found or sought-after objects—present complex landscapes of texture and color. This visual language weaves personal narratives that speak to universal subjects of fragmentation, memory, loss, and family.
“It’s a visual version of emotional experiences,” she says. “There are bits and pieces of so many things that I like and that I pull from. They’re like fragments. I try to break everything down into its most common denominator and then put it together in a way that makes sense.”
Lillian has established herself as a Bahamian artist; exhibiting solo shows at the Central Bank and The College of the Bahamas. Her work has also been featured in group shows at the National Art Gallery of The Bahamas and in the pivotal Funky Nassau – Recovering an Identity exhibition that traveled to Wiesbaden, Germany in 2006. In addition, she has made a name for herself abroad. Her pieces have appeared in group and solo exhibitions in several U.S. states, Trinidad and South Africa, and are included in international permanent collections. On the occasion of her upcoming show at the highly regarded Hammonds House Museum in Atlanta, Georgia--Eye Sea Reflections, running November 22, 2009–January 31, 2010—we take the opportunity to revisit the accomplishments of one of our exceptionally talented scholars.
After graduating from Saint Augustine’s College in 1991, Lillian attended The College of The Bahamas, where she received an Associate’s degree in Art. She then headed off to Georgia to study for a BFA in Textiles and Painting at Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD).
After graduating from SCAD, Lillian went on to earn an MFA from Georgia State University, and she has since taken residencies at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine and The Caversham Center for Artists and Writers in South Africa.
Blades constantly defies many preconceived notions about art. Take, for example, the assumption that art is simply a hobby, or that to be an artist, one has to teach full-time and create in their free time.
“I always said I wanted to be a full time artist,” Blades explains. “I looked at artists like Brent Malone, and I got to spend some time with him, you know, see how he learned and worked on a daily basis and I thought, I want to be just like this, do this every day.”
At one time, Blades mostly made paintings. In fact, when she first embarked on her undergraduate studies, Lillian planned to focus on textiles, with the aim of one day creating a textile company in The Bahamas. However, finding the business side of textiles limiting, she started to concentrate on painting, though she never entirely left behind her attraction to fabrics. Instead, her pieces became painted collages of fabric, the colors and textures becoming the main focus.
“In all of my paintings you see some pattern in it. With painting, I really was more into color and pattern and texture more so than subject matter. I used subject matter as a way of playing with those elements,” she explains.
With an increasing awareness of ‘craft’ or objects made by African or African diaspora cultures for spiritual and functional reasons, she has chosen to pay homage to and build upon this ancestral tradition in her assemblages. Again, one does not quite call them sculpture, does not quite think of them as paintings. Instead they are collections of fragments that contain the emotional dialogue of its maker.
Lillian once described her work as “the visual equivalent of jazz.” The eye, like the ear in an impromptu jazz session, becomes captured again and again at every new turn. Indeed, while her finished works are powerful, the awe for the observer really lies in uncovering the history of each piece; the way Lillian has chosen to construct—carefully, playfully, seriously—her story.
“The effort in putting these things together for me, the process, is very important,” she explains. “You can see that when you look at my work. What you’re seeing is a portrait of the process. The richer it is, the better.”
The beautiful resulting objects seem to be a form of sculptural quilting, and indeed this practice is close to her heart. The social history of quilting making, such as quilting bees, where women would get together and share their fabrics and stories, connects the act of piecing fabric together to the act of conserving community narratives. It is no surprise that when she embarks on community installations, she draws upon the quilt form. Blades contributed to the Atlanta, Georgia community in a similar way with her Community Quilt project at the East Atlanta Library during the summers of 2003-2005. With support from the Fulton Arts Council, Blades helped kids and adults of an up-and-coming community to create a project for their new library. For six hours every Wednesday in the summer, community members came in and painted swatches for a quilt-like display.
“Teaching is a good way to get kids together and to talk to them, get them to think and respond – it forces them to think,” says Blades, who likes to teach short-term community project installations and residencies, rather than invest in a full time position that takes attention away from her own work. “It’s fun to just get them started and thinking, to loosen them up and have them put anything down and respond to it. You don’t have to start with a definite idea. Sometimes I splash paint and go from there. It was really fun to see the older women who came in. They really wanted to be artists. This was the perfect opportunity for them. They painted their houses from memory and in a really abstract way, but it was beautiful.”
For Blades, living in Atlanta and getting involved in their community installations and exhibiting solo shows in their galleries allows her to tap into more than just Bahamian audiences—she also connects her work to African-American and West African experiences and histories. Indeed, her methods of creation draw from several geographical and social spaces.
“I see as though I have a connection with more African art. Even though it’s not as studied as European art, I still feel that it’s valid. I need to help build on that tradition and acknowledge it. And it’s important to me,” Blades explains. “I’m looking at my more West-African ritual-type objects and seeing how they move. They’re for spiritual enrichment. The time and effort they put into it and the symbolism and what they put into it – mirrors and nails and shells, buttons and beads—I connect with that in some way. I don’t know why but there’s something about it in some way that I feel that I would naturally do that. And I think it’s connected to Junkanoo as well – the fragments of clothes and fabric and paper.”
If it seems hard to pin Blades and her work down, don’t be alarmed. She’s the first to admit that her work “is a combination of all sorts of exposures.” In fact, her work—and Lillian herself—is delightfully elusive in that way. Just as she resists wholly committing to one place, one identity, her work too will not rest in one place. Not quite abstract act, not exactly conceptual; not a exactly a sculpture and not quite a painting; both large in size and intricate in fragment; and never contained in a conventional frame, her work challenges observers to reevaluate and dispel the boundaries of geography, creativity, and the unconscious.
Yet her assemblages stay somewhat in the world, mapping the ever-present and evolving themes of her life—subjects that observers universally recognize and respond to. Like a magical realist storyteller, Blades creates for us a space that is both part of the world yet strangely separate—tapping into some unseen dimension at the tip of our noses our wholes lives—and it becomes, finally, the collective unconscious realized through the lens of her experience.
Take, for example, the recurring themes of motherhood and childbirth, and how they relate to passages of time. Disconnected from her mother at the moment of her birth and now a mother of a nine-year-old girl, Lillian’s assemblages oftentimes represent a battle between separation and bonds. Her pieces tenuously reach forwards and backwards at once, trying to find a foundation on which to stand and yet always moving ahead.
“Because I didn’t even know my mom and her side of the family, I feel like wow, I lost a major part of me and I can’t even go back to my mom’s family. I lost a lot of understanding about myself. I could have been raised differently. I’m not mourning over it, it’s just very interesting to me,” Blades explains. “Like right now I’m dissecting all these clothes and I feel like I’m going back in time because my mom was a seamstress. I feel like I’m doing the same thing, like I’m looking back by dissecting clothes and putting them back together in a quilt, but it’s almost like I’m making visual medicine for my own comfort. It makes sense to me.”
This reoccurring theme often manifests itself in her work through color and the dress-shape. In such pieces as Family and Quilted Passage, an installation at the Atlanta Hartsfield- Jackson airport, the reoccurring pure white dress symbol takes center-stage.
“White is a transitional color. White is the beginning of color. The white canvas is the white dress for me. That’s what happens before adulthood, before we’re stained with experiences of living,” Blades explains.
The white dress in her work becomes more than an object, more than a symbol; it moves into archetype territory. In Quilted Passage, these small white dresses hang from a colorful quilted background. Upon closer inspection, we find the colors of the background take on the shapes of larger dresses. It makes us recall a separate piece, the sculpture Matrillneage Dressform, where her assemblages form that same dress shape in a kaleidoscope of color, pattern and accumulated objects. Though beautiful, it is clearly no longer a small white dress—it has become marked with experience, time and age. We sense that all of Blades’ colorful quilt-like sculptures, though not taking on the physical shape of a dress, reside in this space.
“The white dress becomes the paint and becomes part of your quilt. That’s why the white dresses are physical dresses. The dresses that are shaped in the quilt, those are the mother dresses, they are not here, but they provide protective archways for the baby dresses that are in this physical realm,” Blades explains. “There’s still the constant connection with the past. You can’t move so far ahead without acknowledging how far back you’ve been. By understanding, in general, the lifetimes before, the generations before, the struggles before, to build on that will help you more, will make you more knowledgeable.
For her upcoming show, Blades is exploring another theme in her new assemblages, blurring further the line between the observer and the observed to create a direct awareness of the self in the spaces she creates. No longer may we feel detached, engaging with her narratives as one engages with a book while reading it—this time, we are in the book, we are our emotional experience, and we will be conscious of our unconscious response.
“I wanted to human element in there. I wanted you to feel like you were being observed, so I added eyes, images of eyes from many people. I cut them out of magazines,” Blades explains. “And then there are mirrors where you see yourself as well from different angles. It’s hard to focus. You’re fragmented, you see your eyes repeated in several places as well, so you become a part of it.”
Blades moves at her own pace, but she is a force to be reckoned with. Her powerful pieces are reflections of a determined creative drive, tapping into the consciousness of the world beyond our island shores. She is truly an inspiration for artists at home and abroad alike.
“I think at this stage in our development, it’s important to be able to break down doors beyond our shores,” says Antonius Roberts, acclaimed Bahamian artist. “So for Lillian, who has done it, I say fantastic. Because no matter where you are, where you go, you will always take your country with you. It is better for us if more of us can make it on the world stage.”
with Artist Lillian Blades
By Sonia Farmer, Editor of Poinciana Press
Originally published in Lyford Cay Foundation, Inc. Newsletter
November 2009
When you come across a piece of art by Lyford Cay Foundation scholar Lillian Blades, you don’t just look over the work, you engage in a rich emotional exchange. Lillian’ assemblages—large sculptures made up of any combination of picture frames, fabric from clothing, magazine images, buttons and found or sought-after objects—present complex landscapes of texture and color. This visual language weaves personal narratives that speak to universal subjects of fragmentation, memory, loss, and family.
“It’s a visual version of emotional experiences,” she says. “There are bits and pieces of so many things that I like and that I pull from. They’re like fragments. I try to break everything down into its most common denominator and then put it together in a way that makes sense.”
Lillian has established herself as a Bahamian artist; exhibiting solo shows at the Central Bank and The College of the Bahamas. Her work has also been featured in group shows at the National Art Gallery of The Bahamas and in the pivotal Funky Nassau – Recovering an Identity exhibition that traveled to Wiesbaden, Germany in 2006. In addition, she has made a name for herself abroad. Her pieces have appeared in group and solo exhibitions in several U.S. states, Trinidad and South Africa, and are included in international permanent collections. On the occasion of her upcoming show at the highly regarded Hammonds House Museum in Atlanta, Georgia--Eye Sea Reflections, running November 22, 2009–January 31, 2010—we take the opportunity to revisit the accomplishments of one of our exceptionally talented scholars.
After graduating from Saint Augustine’s College in 1991, Lillian attended The College of The Bahamas, where she received an Associate’s degree in Art. She then headed off to Georgia to study for a BFA in Textiles and Painting at Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD).
After graduating from SCAD, Lillian went on to earn an MFA from Georgia State University, and she has since taken residencies at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine and The Caversham Center for Artists and Writers in South Africa.
Blades constantly defies many preconceived notions about art. Take, for example, the assumption that art is simply a hobby, or that to be an artist, one has to teach full-time and create in their free time.
“I always said I wanted to be a full time artist,” Blades explains. “I looked at artists like Brent Malone, and I got to spend some time with him, you know, see how he learned and worked on a daily basis and I thought, I want to be just like this, do this every day.”
At one time, Blades mostly made paintings. In fact, when she first embarked on her undergraduate studies, Lillian planned to focus on textiles, with the aim of one day creating a textile company in The Bahamas. However, finding the business side of textiles limiting, she started to concentrate on painting, though she never entirely left behind her attraction to fabrics. Instead, her pieces became painted collages of fabric, the colors and textures becoming the main focus.
“In all of my paintings you see some pattern in it. With painting, I really was more into color and pattern and texture more so than subject matter. I used subject matter as a way of playing with those elements,” she explains.
With an increasing awareness of ‘craft’ or objects made by African or African diaspora cultures for spiritual and functional reasons, she has chosen to pay homage to and build upon this ancestral tradition in her assemblages. Again, one does not quite call them sculpture, does not quite think of them as paintings. Instead they are collections of fragments that contain the emotional dialogue of its maker.
Lillian once described her work as “the visual equivalent of jazz.” The eye, like the ear in an impromptu jazz session, becomes captured again and again at every new turn. Indeed, while her finished works are powerful, the awe for the observer really lies in uncovering the history of each piece; the way Lillian has chosen to construct—carefully, playfully, seriously—her story.
“The effort in putting these things together for me, the process, is very important,” she explains. “You can see that when you look at my work. What you’re seeing is a portrait of the process. The richer it is, the better.”
The beautiful resulting objects seem to be a form of sculptural quilting, and indeed this practice is close to her heart. The social history of quilting making, such as quilting bees, where women would get together and share their fabrics and stories, connects the act of piecing fabric together to the act of conserving community narratives. It is no surprise that when she embarks on community installations, she draws upon the quilt form. Blades contributed to the Atlanta, Georgia community in a similar way with her Community Quilt project at the East Atlanta Library during the summers of 2003-2005. With support from the Fulton Arts Council, Blades helped kids and adults of an up-and-coming community to create a project for their new library. For six hours every Wednesday in the summer, community members came in and painted swatches for a quilt-like display.
“Teaching is a good way to get kids together and to talk to them, get them to think and respond – it forces them to think,” says Blades, who likes to teach short-term community project installations and residencies, rather than invest in a full time position that takes attention away from her own work. “It’s fun to just get them started and thinking, to loosen them up and have them put anything down and respond to it. You don’t have to start with a definite idea. Sometimes I splash paint and go from there. It was really fun to see the older women who came in. They really wanted to be artists. This was the perfect opportunity for them. They painted their houses from memory and in a really abstract way, but it was beautiful.”
For Blades, living in Atlanta and getting involved in their community installations and exhibiting solo shows in their galleries allows her to tap into more than just Bahamian audiences—she also connects her work to African-American and West African experiences and histories. Indeed, her methods of creation draw from several geographical and social spaces.
“I see as though I have a connection with more African art. Even though it’s not as studied as European art, I still feel that it’s valid. I need to help build on that tradition and acknowledge it. And it’s important to me,” Blades explains. “I’m looking at my more West-African ritual-type objects and seeing how they move. They’re for spiritual enrichment. The time and effort they put into it and the symbolism and what they put into it – mirrors and nails and shells, buttons and beads—I connect with that in some way. I don’t know why but there’s something about it in some way that I feel that I would naturally do that. And I think it’s connected to Junkanoo as well – the fragments of clothes and fabric and paper.”
If it seems hard to pin Blades and her work down, don’t be alarmed. She’s the first to admit that her work “is a combination of all sorts of exposures.” In fact, her work—and Lillian herself—is delightfully elusive in that way. Just as she resists wholly committing to one place, one identity, her work too will not rest in one place. Not quite abstract act, not exactly conceptual; not a exactly a sculpture and not quite a painting; both large in size and intricate in fragment; and never contained in a conventional frame, her work challenges observers to reevaluate and dispel the boundaries of geography, creativity, and the unconscious.
Yet her assemblages stay somewhat in the world, mapping the ever-present and evolving themes of her life—subjects that observers universally recognize and respond to. Like a magical realist storyteller, Blades creates for us a space that is both part of the world yet strangely separate—tapping into some unseen dimension at the tip of our noses our wholes lives—and it becomes, finally, the collective unconscious realized through the lens of her experience.
Take, for example, the recurring themes of motherhood and childbirth, and how they relate to passages of time. Disconnected from her mother at the moment of her birth and now a mother of a nine-year-old girl, Lillian’s assemblages oftentimes represent a battle between separation and bonds. Her pieces tenuously reach forwards and backwards at once, trying to find a foundation on which to stand and yet always moving ahead.
“Because I didn’t even know my mom and her side of the family, I feel like wow, I lost a major part of me and I can’t even go back to my mom’s family. I lost a lot of understanding about myself. I could have been raised differently. I’m not mourning over it, it’s just very interesting to me,” Blades explains. “Like right now I’m dissecting all these clothes and I feel like I’m going back in time because my mom was a seamstress. I feel like I’m doing the same thing, like I’m looking back by dissecting clothes and putting them back together in a quilt, but it’s almost like I’m making visual medicine for my own comfort. It makes sense to me.”
This reoccurring theme often manifests itself in her work through color and the dress-shape. In such pieces as Family and Quilted Passage, an installation at the Atlanta Hartsfield- Jackson airport, the reoccurring pure white dress symbol takes center-stage.
“White is a transitional color. White is the beginning of color. The white canvas is the white dress for me. That’s what happens before adulthood, before we’re stained with experiences of living,” Blades explains.
The white dress in her work becomes more than an object, more than a symbol; it moves into archetype territory. In Quilted Passage, these small white dresses hang from a colorful quilted background. Upon closer inspection, we find the colors of the background take on the shapes of larger dresses. It makes us recall a separate piece, the sculpture Matrillneage Dressform, where her assemblages form that same dress shape in a kaleidoscope of color, pattern and accumulated objects. Though beautiful, it is clearly no longer a small white dress—it has become marked with experience, time and age. We sense that all of Blades’ colorful quilt-like sculptures, though not taking on the physical shape of a dress, reside in this space.
“The white dress becomes the paint and becomes part of your quilt. That’s why the white dresses are physical dresses. The dresses that are shaped in the quilt, those are the mother dresses, they are not here, but they provide protective archways for the baby dresses that are in this physical realm,” Blades explains. “There’s still the constant connection with the past. You can’t move so far ahead without acknowledging how far back you’ve been. By understanding, in general, the lifetimes before, the generations before, the struggles before, to build on that will help you more, will make you more knowledgeable.
For her upcoming show, Blades is exploring another theme in her new assemblages, blurring further the line between the observer and the observed to create a direct awareness of the self in the spaces she creates. No longer may we feel detached, engaging with her narratives as one engages with a book while reading it—this time, we are in the book, we are our emotional experience, and we will be conscious of our unconscious response.
“I wanted to human element in there. I wanted you to feel like you were being observed, so I added eyes, images of eyes from many people. I cut them out of magazines,” Blades explains. “And then there are mirrors where you see yourself as well from different angles. It’s hard to focus. You’re fragmented, you see your eyes repeated in several places as well, so you become a part of it.”
Blades moves at her own pace, but she is a force to be reckoned with. Her powerful pieces are reflections of a determined creative drive, tapping into the consciousness of the world beyond our island shores. She is truly an inspiration for artists at home and abroad alike.
“I think at this stage in our development, it’s important to be able to break down doors beyond our shores,” says Antonius Roberts, acclaimed Bahamian artist. “So for Lillian, who has done it, I say fantastic. Because no matter where you are, where you go, you will always take your country with you. It is better for us if more of us can make it on the world stage.”
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