"Implementation of Adaptation" (2013). Exhibition location: Garrison Art Center, Garrison, NY. 6’1” x 12’ x 24’, suspended 40” above the floor. Beeswax, tree resin, muslin, brass, nylon line, steel, and wood. Photo credit: Fred Hatt.
By Megan Guerber, contributor
Megan Guerber, SciArt Magazine: As an artist, what draws you to the theme of infectious disease? Does fear, curiosity, or awe of these biological phenomena play a role?
Lorrie Fredette: Yes, fear, curiosity, and awe all draw me to infectious disease, and keep me fascinated by it. We regularly hear about infectious diseases that either are or soon could be on our doorsteps because of our increased connectivity. A disease that might have taken months or years to reach us because of limitations in travel can now be on a plane or a cruise ship, exposing unsuspecting passengers who then carry the disease to all their various destinations. Now that people don’t remain rooted in their communities, neither do diseases.
Disease transmission can be broadly classified as direct or indirect. I’m sure most people would find either mode equally frightening. One person’s sneeze expels 40,000 droplets into the air that contain the genetic material of, say, the influenza virus. Some forms of that virus can incapacitate an entire population. The bite of a tiny vector like a mosquito that we generally just deem an annoyance can transmit a crippling microorganism that causes malaria. Both situations are more than worrisome.
These “unseen” forces, both the modes of transmission and the ability to replicate, stir sig- nificant apprehension and significant interest. Our world is full of the “unknown”: Did that person who just sneezed without covering her mouth and nose disperse any virus that I’m now breathing? Did the doorknob I just touched transfer any bacteria to my hand that may infect me?
What I don’t know and what I become exposed to (pun intended) keeps me actively engaged in seeking to understand the complexities of disease. For example, how were we able to reconstruct the 1918 influenza virus? Some of this was done with actual biological material from that time. When did we obtain these samples and where were they stored? Tissue samples from that time had been preserved in paraffin and stored in government facilities. Other tissue samples were obtained during the late 1990s and early 2000s from the deceased buried in Alaska and Norway, where the permafrost had slowed down decomposition. And the natural follow-up: could we see another outbreak of Spanish flu? How would it affect today’s populations?
So fear, curiosity, and awe feed off one another. A question, an answer, a wondrous moment - and the cycle repeats.
"Implementation of Adaptation" (2013). Exhibition location: Garrison Art Center, Garrison, NY. 6’1” x 12’ x 24’, suspended 40” above the floor. Beeswax, tree resin, muslin, brass, nylon line, steel, and wood. Photo credit: Fred Hatt.
MG: Your work is steeped in research. After discovering subject matter through current newspaper headlines or a noteworthy historical event, you spend a great deal of time gathering images. As you explain in your artist statement, you then “alter, vet, and reject [them] through an elaborate system designed to completely subvert and distort any likeness to the original source.” Can you describe this process in more detail?
LF: One reason I began creating a “system” was to thwart my “natural” hand and inclination to work strictly in an orderly fashion. Over time, it has become more complicated as I try to avoid making didactic work. Let me share an overview of the system I’ve created.
First, for me, gathering images is more than collecting pictures. It includes photographs and illustrations but also all my reading on the subject - books, periodicals, or interviews - and the resulting images evoked by that reading. I document a history of each stray piece of data and thought. This chronicling is an integral part of the pursuit; a type of sorting begins to occur. When we think of sorting, we immediately think of logical organization using some type of categories (i.e. transmission because of close proximity, similar symptomatology, etc.). While I participate in this methodology, I also expand the discourse to include the scientifically incompatible (i.e. the folklore). I make mental catalogues and connections (i.e. between a news campaign about clearing standing water to discourage mosquito breeding and the types of containers that exist throughout a domestic environment) and I also sort literally, physically, as I rummage through documentation (i.e. charts of mortality data, geographic regions, and weather patterns). My inquiry produces abstract relationships: as I expose myself to material, my mind slips sideways, for example conjuring beauty and tranquility from inert microscopic imagery in a textbook. I allow in more than “just the facts.”
During this investigative stage I add my own visual notes. I reproduce by hand both the images evoked by the reading and the pictures I’ve physically collected. These drawings range from something as literal as a visual translation of how mosquito eggs float in a raft formation on water to a hybrid interpretation of Lyme spirochetes with the tentacles of a centipede, to a not-at-all literal response to research material I’ve collected, as in Hot and Wet for You, a consideration of dengue fever.
Once I’ve made the first drawing from the source material, I don’t revisit the original source. I work thereafter from the new drawing. Then once I make a second drawing, I reject drawing number 1, and use drawing 2 as my new source material. This replication continues; and I’m fully aware that in each incarnation information is added, rejected, or missing.
When I’ve exhausted the hand making process, I initiate the second step: I scan one or more of the drawings to begin manipulating them digitally. The layering and cropping effects this technology offers speed up the making, although I still subject this work to the same methodology as my hand drawings.
"Re-sampling" (2013). Exhibition location: Westchester Community College,
Valhalla, NY.
9’ 3” x 10’ x 4”. Beeswax, tree resin, muslin, brass, graphite. Photo credit: Fred Hatt.
I see the relationship of each visual translation to its predecessor as linear, orderly, and progressive because I know the sequence has a direct connection to my current inquiry. But should you view these visual considerations, you would not see them as sequential, for you are not carrying around all the notes, experiences, readings, and conversations that I have been exposed to. Understanding the disjunction between what I know and what you see - because you, the viewer, are missing so many particulars - I now think of my visual documentation as information that “skips a generation.”
Finally, there is a fallow period. I walk away for a bit, let my mind’s dust settle and, hope- fully, forget a bit of what I’ve learned in order to move the work to the next place less encumbered by facts. I will step back into hand drawing the digitally altered works, or continue to alter the last digital drawing. Eventually I reach what feels like a logical stopping point, where the process leads me into making an environment.
MG: What roles do scale and repetition play in your work?
LF: I’m interested in installation-based work where the architecture serves as the “host”, the art as the contagion, and the viewer the next victim. In each installation, the viewer is confined and isolated to a restricted area - not quite quarantined, but definitely steered in a particular direction. Implementation of Adaptationpushes the viewer to the perimeter of a gallery. A Pattern of Connectionsrequires you to be constantly looking above you. This physical relationship of the viewer to the work immediately and compellingly shifts the perspective of macro (human) and micro (contagion).
I’m drawn to Eva Hesse’s suggestion that if something is meaningful it might be worth repeating. It’s not possible to think that the making or telling of the same thing over and over again hasn’t led to mutation or exaggeration. This becomes part of the visual folklore. Diseases mutate, as does human information about disease. I’m interested in taking variants of the same form to what I deem the edge, and stopping just before it spreads again.
MG: The materials used in your art, such as muslin and beeswax, are chosen not only because of their connection to medicine and biology but also because of their ability to invoke the human senses. Can you explain in greater detail the importance of these specific materials?
LF: Muslin and wax have both current and historical connotations. Muslin is used in theater to make the patterns for costumes. It filters liquid in cooking. In surgery, it is used to wrap around aneurysms. We also see it in bandages like slings and tourniquets. The most significant medical association of wax is that paraffin has been used to preserve biological samples.
The other strength of beeswax is sensory: its smell. By manipulating the heating and cool- ing system in the exhibition space, alongside well-considered exhibition lighting, a room filled with hundreds of suspended elements will “warm up” enough to release its natural scent. Beeswax is perfume-like enough to be alluring but not so sweet as to assault the senses.
The other senses come into play as well. The heating and cooling system is an air circulator. When considering the environments for my work, I consider the movement of the work in the air currents, which creates a subtle auditory undertone to the piece.
The painted surface of each individual element is fairly smooth. Often, the finish looks flocked. (Flocking refers to very fine fibers on a surface, like the interior of a jewelry box or the grass in an architectural model.) Because the painting material I choose to use is not widely represented in the arts, it’s seductive - even sensual - physically drawing the viewer in, even to the point of hands-on interaction.
Each ingredient acts as a note in the orchestration to create an inviting environment that most people would not knowingly step into should they know its origins.
"Hot and Wet for You 123,000 times, first" (2009). 30” x 22”. Ink on Fabriano paper. Photo credit: Richard Edelman.
MG: Although your art is quite calming and alluring, it depicts ugly and invasive subject matter. Can you speak about the negotiation between beauty, the ugly, and fear in your work?
LF: While we try to turn our heads from the ugly and run away from fear, we stare at and walk towards beauty. So I unabashedly employ beauty in my work. My making involves a natural editing process that extracts visceral horror. Ugliness and fear are organically muted. As a society, we are attentive to attractiveness. It’s alluring. Finding the points of interest in beauty means finding places of satisfaction - a minimal beauty.
Knowing this subjective threshold, I create an environment that is orderly, tidy, calming, comforting. Beauty prompts a replication of itself and, as a result, is also a contagion. Hence the juxtaposition.
MG: You create very intimate experiences for the viewer with installations such as Slide (2012). This work is hung low to the ground with a fl at cart available for the viewer to lie on. The viewer can then travel beneath the work, observing it from underneath in very close proximity. Why did you choose to offer such a vulnerable, belly-up point of view? How does this fit into the overall goals of your work?
LF: I have done two installations that engage the viewer in this fashion. In these incarnations, I’m interested in offering the viewer a choice: the “best experience” of the piece is also the less accessible one. The fact that the most potent way to engage the installation is on your back, “belly-up,” accentuates your submissiveness and susceptibility. Participation is not too dissimilar from real-life exposure to contagion. Yet because of the comfortable environments I create, most people will interact if offered the opportunity.
By selecting the appropriate partnering venue, taking the time to research and understand the underpinnings of the epidemiology and social history of disease, and employing a sense of beauty, I create installations that are like a conversation with each viewer. I believe in the power of conversations, one person at a time.
I often sit at my installations watching how people respond to these room-sized environments. Afterward, I inquire about their experience of and thoughts about the piece. I share where I started from and where the work ended up. These conversations inform the next iteration and future installations.
