Willa Siegmund

My exhibition concerns itself primarily with the themes of home, and the tranquility, as well as agitation, of nature. My work captures these two themes to create an all-round warm and engaging installation. I have always been fascinated by clouds and their ability to change shape and color in preparation for a storm or just after; clouds are quite an emotional element in nature. I find beauty in their isolation. I showcased my theme of home, more so through photography and collage as representative of my attempts to piece together the different places where I feel most at home and bring them into harmony. My collages also have a somewhat whimsical feel to them, which I find perfectly represents the relationship I have with my family.

In painting my clouds, I have relied heavily on oil paints and wood. Oil paints have become my medium of choice as they remain wet for long periods of time, and are therefore easier to manipulate. Their slow-drying feature helps me create more blurred and blended clouds, resulting in a finish that I find most appealing and realistic. And, using wood as my canvas for many of these paintings has allowed me to cultivate my work’s theme of nature, as I believe this wood to be the natural alternative to ordinary canvas. For most of my clouds, I used a dark palette to create intense shading and hard edges, while a few other paintings exhibit lighter blues and whites to make a softer cloud. As inspiration for this work I have looked to artists April Gornik and Byron Kim, who model these two methods in their own work-Gornik using charcoal to create explosive, dark clouds, and Kim using a lighter palette to create more blurred and soft clouds. These stark contrasts help my viewer understand that my work embodies the idea that clouds, or nature, are ever changing.

My theme, of home is more strongly communicated through my collages. I used slightly perplexing photos and frequent layering in these pieces to create a disorienting experience for the viewer. This method communicates that a home appears different to those outside of it. In exploring this theme, I especially grapple with family members living a great distance away and struggling to feel at home in these foreign places.

For the installation of my exhibition, I have attempted to create a space in which the viewer may feel challenged and comfortable at the same time. This can be seen in the way that I have created a series of clouds in the build up to or the midst of a storm. In placing a calm scene next to a hectic and intimidating scene, I am highlighting how clouds may dramatically transform into a short time. As a result, the viewer may find comfort in a cloud that appears softer and peaceful, and then be confronted with a dramatic, storm cloud, and may suddenly feel uneasy. My work challenges viewers to find peace in its chaos. My largest cloud painting will tower over the viewer at the highest point of my installation. The placement and scale of this painting make it clear to the viewer that this exhibition will focus primarily on the impact of clouds. Below this imposing cloud sits my other, smaller scale, cloud series. The collages are spread throughout the exhibition to interrupt the overwhelming amount of paintings and to introduce a different medium. As they concern themselves mostly with the theme of home, the distribution of these collages represents how my appreciation of nature and family coincides; these two themes exist hand in hand, and one could not continue without the other. There will also be a video of crashing waves playing on a monitor to enhance that central theme of nature and appreciation of life.

Moving forward as an artist, I intend to continue my work with collages, as I especially enjoy the manipulation of ordinary photos to confuse my viewer and force them to question their interpretation. I am also interested in expanding my work into mediums other than print, painting, or photography. For instance, I may further experiment with film and video manipulation, as I do in my exhibition.