Divide Light #3
2002
Thread, tea-stained chiri paper
57 x 3.5 x 4 in
Words have Wings that Fly from the Mouths of Others
By Thyrza Nichols Goodeve
I Heard a Voice : The Art of Lesley Dill Exhibition Catalogue
Hunter Museum of Art
There is the moving image. There is the sculpture. There is the pull of a ribbon. There is the photograph. There is the sculpture of an open hand, long colored threads attached in bunches to the fingertips, pulled by gravity to the floor. There is the wire that is woven, the photographs that are scratched, the foil that is cut, the obsessive repetitive gestures of the making, the duration and the weeks and months it takes. There is the text, the words, the repletion. The constant push and pull between, and yes, amongh, images and words, suggestions of movement and meaning. Diaphanous spectacles and shifting displays, in the gallery and the museum and elsewhere in live performance and opera. All in motion. All about language. All as visual art.
Lesley Dill has made art in collaboration with the poetry of Emily Dickinson since 1990. Correction, Lesley Dill has made art out of, and with, Dickinson's language, not her poetry, since 1990. Rarely does she work with an entire poem but instead culls line fragments-
A single screw of flesh is all that pins the soul
A single screw...is part of a powem that is twenty lines long. But for Dill its power is as a solitary sentence which becomes a kind of cloth, or a ribbon, draped and reprocessed.