/THE NATURE OF THINGS

Lisa Barthelson

Material Needs 2024

September 5 - October 20, 2024

materials funded: woodblocks, linoleum, ink, carving tools, paper

Lisa Barthelson’s family debris series, fifteen years in the making, grew from the artist’s shock at the excess accumulation of “things” from her family of five. Seeing piles of plastic toys, stacks of food packaging, and remnants from her own studio art practice, Barthelson was shocked at the level of personal consumerism that her family had bought into, and even more devastated by the larger context of the mass rampant consumption that fuels the global climate crisis. The family debris series repurposes these cast-off household items and Barthelson’s obsolete art detritus for new printmaking, mixed media, sculpture, and installation work.

On view in Material Needs 2024 are a series of prints inspired by Barthelson’s collection of disposable manmade consumer goods and the geometric shapes and patterns of nature that she witnesses on her daily walks. Contrasting the fluid lines and energy of water, leaves, and vines with the immediately recognizable forms of clothespins, scissors, bread tags, and more, Barthelson showcases the ongoing silent combat between nature and things.

Carving and printing the blocks was a meditative process for Barthelson over the course of the year, as she reckoned not only with the ever-present threats of the climate crisis, but increased anxiety about war, democracy, social justice, and the future. In this darkness, she sought vibrant color and a sense of control, layering the prints and composing riotous chaos or imposed geometry. Barthelson pushed the prints, and therefore her symbols for nature and things, to the third dimension, folding and sculpting to create vessel-like forms.

The work exhibited here is the result of exploration, discovery, and repetition, first begun at the Monson Arts Residency in Maine and continued in Barthelson’s studio in Worcester. “All about the making,” says Barthelson, “the compulsion, the color, the pattern: it’s the nature of things.”