July Portfolio: Pamela Wallace

Pamela Wallace

Dutchess County resident Pamela Wallace has crafted for herself a life with a single organizing principle—the sheer act of making. Having studied sculpture at Bard College and Southern Illinois University, she has focused on, for lack of a better word, a makerly aesthetic, which involves fabricating, forging, sewing, carving, casting or welding virtually every element of her work. Often her sculptures locate the unexpected intersection where nature and industry meet, as forged steel rusts, or raw wood weathers to a bleached, silvery sheen. Her poetic forms frequently invoke abstract grids, but this abstraction inevitably breaks down, as the logic and the process of the physical materials take center stage.

Wallace has most recently been working on a large site-specific piece made of plastic sheets sewn together with wood wool inside titled Still, Between My Arm and Shoulder (pictured on this page), which will fill a broad expanse of wall in the main gallery at the Arts Society of Kingston. The work is a key component of the exhibition “Allusive Objects,” a show-within-the-show that is part of the Kingston Sculpture Biennial, which opens on July 7 (and which I am the curator).

—Beth E. Wilson

PAMELA WALLACE ON HER WORK

Making and thinking

I can’t really imagine not doing it, or living without it. It’s about making things, using my hands, manipulating material, and it’s gotten to the point where it’s in every aspect of my life. I work part time as a carpenter, part time teaching art, I’m building a new studio, and I guess I’m a part-time—or is it full-time?—artist on top of all that. I love it.

I think art making is about using your hands. In the 20th century, this separation happened between making and concept, and I don’t understand why that happened. I see them as being part of the same thing. I don’t think you can separate the two. How many people do I know that try to make art on concept alone and it fails, it almost always fails. I think there’s some fantastic conceptual art out there, but I don’t think it’s all successful. I don’t think a student learning to make art can just say “I’m gonna make conceptual art and it’ll be great.” That works for one in a million. The two [aspects] have to go together.

So it’s about liking to manipulate things and making things with my hands, but also thinking about having these ideas come to me of how to put something together, how to make something. Those ideas can come to me totally unexpectedly as I walk down the street, while I’m eating my bowl of cereal, while I’m in the studio when I just pick up a piece of metal and ask, “What if I take this thing and cast it?” Or, “What if I soak it in plaster and then in resin and sit it outside and let the weather get to it?” Suddenly it hits a point when it makes sense to me.