The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
ARTFUL THREADS
Branford artist maps places and pathways of humanity as part of New Haven’s 22nd annual ‘artstravaganza’
NEW HAVEN — The next time you descend the escalator to baggage claim in the Delta Terminal at Bradley International Airport, look up. You and the millionplus travelers annually who stroll through that terminal may not realize it, but you are sharing part of the fascinating creative journey of Branford artist Leila Daw.
Hanging in the rafters since 2002, “Planetary Conditions,” a complex, multipart, mixedmedia installation, is just one leg of her journey, fittingly started as a graduate student at Washington University with skywriting projects in the heartland city of St. Louis. That journey has had many legs, the latest of which she shares at this year’s CityWide Open Studios.
It wasn’t her only skyhigh venture. As she says, she became known “as the crazy artist” who mapped the skies, but Daw came back to Earth with the realization “that I didn’t have to go up in the air to do this. I simply started doing images of maps, things that could be maps,” some of which locals here will remember in her steel map benches of a decade or
so ago. Daw, 69, has the honor of being featured on two weekends of the city’s 22nd annual artstravaganza: first on Erector Square Weekend Oct. 1920 and then on Alternative Space Weekend at the Yale West Campus (Nov. 23).
At the first, visitors to her magical studio can view the living catalog of her career — a prolific production of awardwinning works in a wide variety of mediums; public, sitespecific art and commissioned projects that can be seen in museums, airports and even bridges and walkways; and landscaping and art designs for metro railways, parks and highways; and her latest creations based on the Burmese craft of shwe
chi doe (golden thread tapestry).
“A lot of what I do is based on real places, but in other times the work is about a place that ought to exist. A lot of work is about vanished cities,” says the ardent environmentalist. “Much of my work addresses climate change and the knowledge that no human civilization has ever been sustainable.”
Daw’s career also includes several decades as a teacher; she is currently Professor Emerita at Massachusetts College of Art.
On Alt Space Weekend Nov. 23, Daw unveils a journey back through eons of the strata history of the Earth with “Ages of Life: Inhabiting the Fossil Record,” a collaborative work with her art assistant and embroidery expert Alexis Musinski. It’s one of 13 special commissions selected by host organization Artspace for the event’s “Older, But Younger” theme, in which the collaborators must have a 25year age difference between them.
Daw’s works explore boundaries and pathways, how we connect to the planet geographically, geologically and consciously, and, in some instances, without conscience, she says. Her works have represented real places, real places reimagined and places “that ought to exist,” the latter a nod to some places that fell to the vicissitudes of both climate change or plunder by humans or natural phenomena.
Her fascination with the golden thread tapestry began serendipitously when she accompanied her husband, Nigel, on a business trip to Asia where had an opportunity to visit Burma. (“I know it’s Myanmar now,” she says, “but I hate to call it that because of the military uprising there.”)
“There was something about Asia that spoke to me, how the culture just permeated the land, the way the culture had transformed the land unlike any in the Western world,” she says.
In the markets there, she noticed works she says with a laugh that “would be considered the equivalent of Elvis paintings on black velvet, only they were sequined elephants.” On closer inspection, her artist’s eye was drawn to the “incredible” sparkly handmade thread in the background, and the combination of sequins and “lots of different kinds of beads.”
Daw could smell another art trek. She hired a guide to take her to a workshop in Mandalay to learn the art of shwe chi doe.
The language barrier proved no problem to the collaborative as they started creating works together, Daw painting the background in acrylic and the group adding the painstaking beading and thread work atop. She carried the canvases home and added her own touches of twodimensional pieces to the craftsmanship. She’s been back five times to continue the work with her new friends and stock up on supplies.
From Erector Square to the Yale West Campus, Daw and Musinski delve deep into the Earth’s ancient DNA with the panel work selected as part of Artspace’s thematic mission to bring older and younger artists together to examine aging and intergenerational issues. “Our 25plusyear age difference is nothing in comparison to the age of the Earth,” she laughs.
As Daw wrote in their submission plan, “People are curious about fossils and fascinated by the idea of ancient life evolving to their present selves, but ‘fossil’ is also a pejorative term describing older people being set in their ways and useless. This project meditates on both of those meanings.
“The twist is that parts of the fossils are transparent, so you can see yourself and your friends as ephemeral parts of our fossil record as you go through this installation,” says Daw.
With help from Yale Peabody Museum’s Susan Butts, Marilyn Fox and Christopher Renton, and several local inkind donors, they have cultivated their playful acrylicontwill menagerie of trilobites (early arthropods), dickinsonia (perhaps Earth’s earliest life form), crinoids (starfish ancestors) and more from the rich age of fishes rendered in acrylic drawings enhanced by Musinski’s multidimensional sewn addons. Even though they admit to taking some license with exactitude of some of the fossils, Daw says, “The hope is that this has a life after CWOS. The Peabody is closing for two years of renovation, so perhaps The Bruce Museum or some other art/science museum.”
“If things continue the way they are, we will only exist in the fossil record,” she says. There will be no humans living on Earth.”
One feels that somehow that Daw might just find a way to chronicle that.