a still small voice: Conceptual Objects: An Io Palmer Lecture

Entitled Conceptual Objects, Io Palmer’s lecture emphasizes the artist’s intention to use each object made with a variety of media to construct the idea of “an act, gesture or performative moment”, which readily propels itself to the viewer. In Conceptual Objects, the speaker reveals her immense sensitivity to her tendencies in her art practice as a mixed media artist.

If art is a new language, Io Palmer is a creator of beautifully crafted words. She is a removed observer of herself and her thought processes and signifies them through riddles. Each piece is like a specimen of gold plated words – always idealized, perfected and framed.

Her most well-known sculpture series are she the presentation of hair like sculptural masses to represent the act of thinking. To her, the character of the lines of hair defines the type of thinking – confusing thoughts or calm thoughts. In these she individualizes hair by its unique characters, be it frizzy or calm, thick or thin. Like the way words build up meaning through relationship with other words, her work builds from symbolic forms utilized in previous works. For example, once it is established that hair represent thoughts emerging from the mind, she takes a step forward to propose that the act of sweeping hair is likened to the act of letting go of thoughts.

With concise and articulate presentation, the lecture takes its audience beyond the cases of the mix media artist’s delicate pieces and brings us to their origins: her history of aesthetic vision. Coming from a small, peaceful and idyllic island of Hydra in Greece, she finds beauty and meaning in the most mundane or grotesque forms. Even repetition became one of her favorite aesthetics. To Io Palmer, repetition and repetitive acts are defining symbols of the process of labor. Work is always laborious and a road to reaching a spiritual high ground, where we become elevated beings. Because of these tendencies, she finds beauty in the mundane patterns formed by a pile of rope lines or a fleet of sandy stairs.

Upon finding meaning and beauty in her surroundings, she enhances their aesthetic by re-staging them. Her work looks neat and out of place, like an artifact in a museum. Her love of labor and the mundane is apparent in her working process. She weaves ropes of thread into numerous intricate hair shaped structures. Then, as if she was a type setter forming a meaningful sentence, she spaces them neatly apart from one another in the gallery. Her shows often synesthisizes a sense of introspection and isolation, with the presence of other viewers are rarely felt.

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Past event:
Galen Ceramics Lecture Series presents: Io Palmer
January 26, 2009