ARTiculate Artist Talk: Parker / Kerr / Roe
Baton Rouge Gallery
Baton Rouge
March 8
Why do artists make what they do? Who are the people in their paintings? Why did they switch mediums halfway through their careers? What inspires them, and how do they keep going?
These are among the questions you can have answered at the ARTiculate Artist Talks, a monthly free event at the Baton Rouge Gallery. Each artist featured gives a short presentation of the work on view and takes audience questions. There are snacks and some extra time at the end for independent viewing.
This month, the event featured artists Jacqueline Dee Parker, Eleanor Owen Kerr, and Herb Roe.
Kerr started her career as a black-and-white landscape photographer. A few years ago, after a tragic year of multiple deaths in her family, she found that she just couldn’t take photos anymore.
“I couldn’t see a photograph,” she explained in her talk, “I couldn’t take anything.”
Later that year, she saw a plant that inspired her to make cyanotype — a cameraless photoprocess which involves coating watercolor paper with a UV sensitive solution, placing organic materials over it, covering it with glass and setting it out in the sun.
“It’s very unscientific,” she said in response to a question about the process, “There’s a high rate of failure, and you just accept that you’ll have a large collection of expensive French water color paper in your studio.”
All three artists spoke about how grief impacted their work. They had all lost someone, and their art changed in response whether it was a different medium or tribute pieces in a different style to honor those they’d lost. But Kerr’s work, titled “Heaven and Earth,” reflects this in a different way. When one makes cyanotype, they cut a plant off, usually in the prime of its life. The process by which it is documented requires the literal life blood of the plant to be printed on the paper, and it destroys the plant. It’ll never print the same way again, and once it’s been clipped, its life was short anyway.
“Not to be precious about it, but this is the last thing they’ll get to do,” Kerr said of the plants.
She tries to make it worth it despite it not always working out. Looking at her work arranged together, you see white silhouettes of these plants printed against a signature Prussian Blue that has become such a motif in so many cultures. It’s reminiscent of the deep indigo that came from the cash crop of Louisiana which so many enslaved people risked and lost their lives to produce, porcelain pottery of Chinese culture, the blue and white clouds of the sky.
Kerr’s work is accented by gold leaf, hand placed by her. The work is a collaboration among the plants, the sun, and of course, her. Cyanotype is a process which creates archival work. It’s forever. A beautiful reminder of the interconnected nature of life and art.
