The delicacy of a moth’s wing, the shadowy space between the clock and the bed that looms large during a bout of insomnia: small details fill Marie Watt with wonder and become the basis for thoughtful, elegant works of art. Through her art, she draws attention to the unnoticed parts of our lives. “I am particularly drawn to the human stories and rituals implicit in everyday objects,” she has said. “Like blankets, bridges, and doorknobs. Made familiar by use and scaled to the body, they often go unnoticed, but make me think about the relationship between part and whole; I wish to capture this sense of familiarity in the objects I make.”
Officially a member of the Seneca tribe of upstate New York, where her mother was raised, Marie Watt grew up in Redmond, Washington. Her mother, originally trained as a nurse, became a specialist in Indian Education. Her work brought the family new friendships and connections to the urban Indian community of the Northwest, and Marie credits her knowledge of and commitment to her heritage to her mother’s change of careers when Marie and her sister were little. As a student at Willamette College in Oregon (with no idea of becoming an artist), she enrolled in an art class and found, as Inara Verzemnieks has written, that it resonated with her. “Art, she discovered, gave her a way to explore [her heritage, her connection to the world, to other people].” She went on to study at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, and at Yale, where she received her M.F.A. She has been teaching at art at Portland Community College in Oregon since 1996.
In 2002, Watt exhibited works in a solo show entitled Sleep and Sleeplessness. For one installation, Blanket/Sieve, she arranged white alabaster stones riddled with drilled holes on the gallery floor in a rectangle, and paired these with a larger piece of alabaster carved into the shape of a bed pillow. One corner of the rectangle pulled toward the wall, as if tugged by sleep. Yet the incongruity of soft bedding made out of hard stone alluded to the complexity of moving from wakefulness to slumber. A related series of minimalist drawings made with alabaster dust and white ink conveyed that singular sensation when the luxuriance of sleep is tinged with trepidation.
More recently, Watt has turned her attention away from sleep to focus on blankets, both as subject and medium. “My work,” she writes, “is about social and cultural histories embedded in commonplace objects.” If one thinks about it, blankets enfold rich layers of history; a blanket may hold profound significance for a child, for example, or it may have been passed through a family from generation to generation. The associations are often, though not always, poignant. As the artist says, “We are received in blankets, and we leave in blankets.” Her work “is inspired by the stories of those beginnings and endings, and the life in between.”
Watt suggests that through our intimate and deeply personal relationships with them, blankets in a sense become extensions of us.
One of the great things about the blankets is that there is no such thing as a square blanket. People have inhabited them and worn them. You put the sides together and you think they are going to match, but they don’t. They are really wonderful in that way. I love how each blanket has its own personality. As a result, they don’t stack easily. They have this posture that is not really that different from the human body. The blankets have a will of their own.
They also have a vulnerability that is perhaps most evident in the satin bindings of a blanket’s edges. Frayed and well worn, these soft remnants also captivate Marie Watt.
She speaks, too, of the special meaning and historical importance that blankets have for Native American cultures. They are given even today to honor individuals “for being witnesses to important life events – births and comings-of-age, graduations and marriages, namings and honorings. For this reason,” she notes, “it is as much of a privilege to give a blanket away as it is to receive one.” In earlier times, they served as vital trade items between indigenous peoples and European settlers. In Three Sisters: Six Pelts, Cousin Rose, Sky Woman, and Relations, the towering stacks of folded blankets (held together with invisible cable) rise to the sky from square cedar bases invoke the story of Sky Woman, who in the Iroquois (Seneca) creation story falls from an opening in the sky which leads to the creation of life on earth.
But Three Sisters and related pieces invite stories as much as or more than they convey particular stories and this, I think, is a critical distinction. As artist and curator Truman Lowe has said, Watt’s work “involves and creates community.” To complete her imposing blanket tapestries, Watt enlisted the help of friends and family, and the sense of community that emerged is palpable in the finished pieces. More than 75 individuals assisted and as they gathered to stitch, they shared the stories of their lives, like so many others have done in sewing bees and quilting circles.
In many ways, then, the blanket pieces pay quiet homage to important craft traditions, just as the cedar base and stacked blankets in Three Sisters gracefully acknowledge the linen closets and cedar chests of the private, domestic sphere. But Marie’s work also enters into dialogue with avant-garde art traditions. Bold compositions of concentric circles reference Jasper Johns’ Targets, which similarly slowed down the act of looking and drew attention to those overlooked corners of visual culture. Her blanket columns engage the history of sculpture, from Brancusi’s Endless Column and Robert Morris’ anti-form pieces made of industrial felt and to Joseph Beuys’ performances robed in heavy gray blankets. Though very different from Robert Rauschenberg’s Bed, her blanket pieces play in that same space between public and private spheres, art and craft traditions.
All of these ideas and influences are evident in the careful, precise prints Marie Watt made at Tamarind. The woven texture of wool, the concentric circles and bands of contrasting color, the meandering trail of linked diamond shapes and patchwork quilt design are imprinted on successive plates, on separate, overlapping sheets of fine paper like blankets on a bed. Even the worn edges of a blanket find their equivalent in these prints in the soft, torn edges of papier colle. Yet these relationships, like her palette, are subtle and suggestive.
Similarly, references to Jasper Johns and the early black paintings of Frank Stella are blended with patchwork quilt designs. But the associations do not end there. All of her patterns and motifs have the possibility of infinite extension. Like cells that divide and multiply or ripples that spread out from a single drop of rain, the sense of rootedness in multiple traditions is counterweighted with the possibility of regeneration and growth.
“It’s the small moments in our day that are important, really, not the grand things.” (Beebe)