*Bog Etude #2 (Detail): Silk, wax, bog stain, bog mud*

Moira Bateman creates assemblages from waxed silk, stained with waterway sediments of Minnesota rivers, lakes, and bogs. (Her companion exhibition, 2022 McKnight Fiber Art Fellowship Exhibition, Etudes: Watersheds, Bogs, Kayaks, will be on view at Textile Center, 3000 University Ave NE, Minneapolis, MN, January 17 – April 8, 2023. See www.textilecentermn.org for more information.)

Exhibition Dates: January 05– February 11, 2023

Artist's Conversation and Reception

Saturday, January 28, 2023 Conversation at 3:00 - 3:45 pm Artist’s Reception following to 5:30 pm

Fiber Artist Moira Bateman in Conversation with Dr. Irma Mayorga, Theatermaker/Scholar

Dr. Irma Mayorga’s scholarship examines contemporary theater and performance by U.S. people of color, theater by women, and U.S. Latina/o/x culture and identity. She is also a theater director, dramaturg, designer, and award-winning playwright.

*Bog Etude #2: Silk, wax, bog stain, bog mud*

Artist's Statement

In all truth, I didn’t begin my career with the intention of working as a textile/fiber artist; I began as an artist who worked with earth, plants, and land. I began my artistic work with land art and landscape architecture. My work centered on conversations with ideas of a place (site specific constructions), and work that enfolded materials such as dirt, wood, clay, and, importantly, plants as gardens, crops, or wild habitat. I sought to explore and describe concepts of wilderness and waterways – as well as ideas of toxicity inflected on the earth, mothering and nurturing, as well as growth and caretaking more broadly.

Markings on cloth to describe conditions are an important gesture in my work. I have learned I can let go of total control of my artistic process and engage the natural world to participate in a new way: I have come to think of the earth, and specifically the bogs and watersheds of Minnesota, as my collaborators. In this collaboration, like motherhood, I must embrace fully the primal, biological, durational, and uncontrollable aspects of making and, instead, engage instinct.

I create assemblages from silk that has been stained with waterway sediments. For my textile abstractions, I leave silk to soak (for weeks, months, or years) in the waters, mud, and sediments of rivers, lakes, and bogs throughout Minnesota. Sediments carried in the waters of these locations dye the silk and imbue the cloth with many types of startling markings. After I retrieve the silk, I cut it and place the cut shapes into patterns, which I join together with wax to preserve and transform the silk into skin-like, large-scale, cloth assemblages. As an abstractionist, my hope is that the organic shapes, earth colors, stains, and textures of my assemblages evoke a strong sense of place as well as the movement and condition of water and time.

In my work’s interests in time, water, birth, history, dirt, and life-cycles, the markings, colors, textures, and deteriorations made by water on the cloth that I soak in Minnesota watersheds not only intend to make visible the wonder of life hidden within water, but also seek to render visible ways in which our earth has and continues to be damaged by destructive human actions.

Artist's Biography

Moira Bateman creates assemblages from silk, stained with waterway sediments. Her chosen fabrics are soaked for days, months, and even years in the waters, mud, and sediments of rivers, lakes, and bogs of Minnesota. Past collaborative projects with authors, poets, theater makers, and scientists have monitored and documented the conditions of Minnesota’s watersheds. Bateman’s work has been exhibited across the region including the Minnesota Museum of American Art, the Science Museum of Minnesota, and the Minnesota Marine Art Museum in Winona. By Way of Water was presented as a solo installation at the Bowery Gallery in New York City in 2019, and her work was recently featured in a virtual exhibition at the Integral Museum of Akademgorodok, Novosibirsk, Siberia. She holds a Master’s degree in Landscape Architecture from the University of Minnesota. Currently, her studio is located in the Northeast Minneapolis Arts District in the Casket Arts Building.

Moira Bateman is a recipient of a 2022 McKnight Fellowship in Fiber Arts, administered with support from Textile Center.

Press

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