Work by Kelly Baisley and Virginia Catherall
NOVEMBER 9, 2018 – JANUARY 11, 2019
Sense of Place, Great Salt Lake depicts the landscape around the Great Salt Lake, which over time transforms not only its geography but also the people who interact with it. Artists Kelly Baisley and Virginia Catherall explore this rugged and transformational landscape through different mediums, photography and textiles, but with similar attention to the visual elements that make up the fluctuating lake.
Kelly Baisley’s photographs focus on a close look at the land, sometimes abstract and intangible, sometimes more broad and sweeping. The landscape becomes a layered document of changing seasons, times, and weather. Baisley’s photographs also document an expansion in her artistic focus and style. Through her explorations of Great Salt Lake she records moments, altering how she experiences landscape and nature.
Virginia Catherall’s textiles reflect intimate experiences with Great Salt Lake. Sometimes wearable art and sometimes unwearable sculptures, Catherall’s fiber art reflects the transformative nature of the lake through texture and color. Her familiarity with this saline environment belies the surprise that each work of fiber art gives to the viewer or the wearer, capturing the essence of an element of the lake for others to take part in, and ultimately being changed by the experience.
Throughout this collaboration, Baisley and Catherall inspired and informed each other’s work through their encounters with Great Salt Lake. Although their solo and joint explorations of these spaces manifested in different formats, one tangible and one visual, they both sought to evoke and share a sense of place.
These two contrasting mediums displayed together give the viewer an intimate look at two artists’ impressions of an inland sea that dominates the landscape they live in. Through photographs and textiles, the exhibition illuminates this vast body of water saltier than the ocean, offering a glimpse of its great beauty, tranquility, and fierceness.
*Featured image: Virginia Catherall, Salt Flats Sunrise, Merino wool & nylon, 2018; Kelly Baisley, Sunrise, Bonneville Salt Flats, Chromogenic print, 2018