Telling Time with ‘Art As Artifact’
Workshop with Lisa Pressman & Sue Stover at Willow Pond SLO, September 2024
Visual Conversations and Telling Time with Artifacts
Susan Stover and Lisa Pressman are two inimitable instructors and the ideal pairing of superb talent. In September they arrived at Willow Pond to lead a 5-day immersive workshop diving into the concept of art as artifact.
Art has always been a means by which people leave behind traces of their existence. Whether it's a cave painting from thousands of years ago or a modern masterpiece, art serves as an artifact that represents a specific time, place, and culture. This class explored ideas of visible traces, remnants, and fragments of something left behind.
Sue Stover is an artist who creates works that explore personal and collective memory, and symbolic meanings tied to patterns, objects, and places. Having studied many aesthetic traditions from around the world, she embraces ritual, tradition, and meditation inherent in repetitive processes.
“My work revolves around how we innately look for patterns in an attempt to make sense of or find order in our surroundings..I am interested in the human impulse to leave a mark and decorate. Approaching these visual and kinetic aspects, I construct pieces that blur the lines between painting, textiles, and sculpture.”
Lisa Pressman grew immersed in multiple forms of cultural expression that nurtured her curiosity and aesthetic sensibility from a young age. Pressman’s artistic career is marked by exploration, testing the boundaries of the expressive potential latent in a variety of mediums among them oil, encaustic, cold wax, and mixed-media collage. Her work is abstract, conceptually based, and process driven. Lisa’s artworks feature marks, forms, colors and patterns that are evocative rather than overt.
“My painting is infused with a personal history that includes immense loss and grief. My life journey shifted dramatically after the death of my son, who died in 2019 at the age of 26.”
One key aspect of art as artifact is its ability to convey a sense of time. Incorporated into this focus was the concept of time, of real or imagined histories, and of faded or foggy memories. Their goal was to explore the nature of personal work, what interests you, and what drives you to create.
Even though they work very differently and live on opposite sides of the country, Stover and Pressman signal a call and response not only in their style, practice, or groupings of work but also in how their teaching styles resonated among our class. Innately they seem to belong together by encouraging others to tell an abstract narrative.
In group discussion, the artist students employed their own visual elements or mementos that hold personal meaning and through daily presentations, demonstrations, and one-on-one guidance the students had an opportunity to create a new or build upon a narrative in their own work. There is such a burst of creativity that comes through storytelling and the observation of time. Five incredible days later, the artist students left with new techniques, a deepening of their studio practice, and new direction all while unraveling among friends at our Willow Pond workshop.
About the Artists
Susan received a MFA from California College of Art in Oakland, California and a BFA from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. Her works are in many private and corporate collections. She is represented by Carrie Haddad Gallery in Hudson, NY and Colibri Gallery in Morgan Hill, CA. Susan teaches workshops online, in person at other locations in the U.S., and internationally.
Lisa received her BA, Fine Art from Douglass College from Rutgers University, with an emphasis in ceramics and sculpture. As a graduate student she changed her emphasis from sculpture to painting, receiving her MFA in Painting from Bard College. Since then she has exhibited regionally and nationally in solo and group exhibitions at spaces such as the Cape Cod Museum of Art,(Dennis MA) The Holter Museum of Art (Helena, MT,) and Hunterdon Art Museum (Clinton,NJ ) and her work is held in numerous private and public collections. Her work is represented by Susan Eley Fine Arts (New York, NY,) Addington Gallery (Chicago, IL) and Slate Gallery (Telluride, Colorado.) The artist has a solo exhibition in New York City at Susan Eley Fine Art in NYC, December 2022. She worked on the faculty of the former Art Institute of NY, and served as a visiting professor at Pratt Institute and other universities. She has taught workshops in France, Mexico, Italy and the US.
