Close Up

by Thomasine Bartlett, N.O.A.R.

Excerpt:

Record, 2008

Mary Jane Parker has long been fascinated by the similarities between microscopic images of blood cells and satellite photos of the cosmos, between intestines and the roots of plants in short, the links between the human and the infinite. Specimens a work that predates Hurricane Katrina, brings twenty individual cells together to create a complete work. Hung in a grid pattern, the individual panels – depicting body parts, stars and natural elements — merge into a new whole that fuses the microcosm with the macrocosm.

Displaced to Baton Rouge during the first uncertain days after the storm, Parker purchased cheap yarn the first she could find and began knitting, a craft she had neglected for decades. Although not consciously acknowledged, it was a symbolic act of weaving things together of making something from disembodied string an act of creating a new order. She soon began to literally put things in order in her mother’s damaged house, her own flooded house and the studio that she shares with her husband. Unable to work artistically during this period of restoration, it was not until she undertook a 2007 summer residency in Santa Fe almost two years after the storm that the literal work of ordering that she had been doing in the storm’s wake began to appear in her artwork as well. The Santa Fe residency was Parker’s first opportunity to gain distance and perspective post Katrina. The work that emerged is different from the earlier work in that it is less complex more straightforward, and. perhaps, more profound. Ritual and Double Plant are images from this later period. Painted in the difficult and tedious medium of encaustic, each utilizes the elements that Parker found comforting in the period immediately after the storm, linked together to create new meaning. Individual sprigs of clover knitted together to form a circular chain, dead blossoms, a thorny twig: each carries a new meaning as an element of Ritual. While the thorns may prick and there may be some casualties, re-invention restores life. Double Plant, created of encaustic and woodcut, imposes order over chaos: two panels represent an uprooted plant and a clover chain, arranged in a spiral. Like Robert Smithson’s mysteriously re-emerging Spiral Jetty, the two images suggest continuity, renewal and the persistence of life.