I am a Word Collector. I had an electrical experience reading a book of Emily Dickinson's poetry, given to me by my mother. As I turned the pages some phrases would jump into my eyes and fly down my throat like birds and in that place inside me, images for art making would be born. After 7 years, I was able to read other poets and the same process would happen I now take these years of collected language and knit them together into something of a text smash and give them to the viewer like a gift. I am a matchmaker between word & image. And every sculpture or song or drawing - each one has to have its own skew of a linguistic attendant."
- Lesley Dill
Lesley Dill is an American artist working at the intersection of language and fine art. Exploring the power of words to cloak and reveal the psyche, Dill invests new meaning in the human form. Fluid metaphors, appropriated from the poetry and writings of Emily Dickinson, Salvador Espriu, Tom Sleigh, Franz Kafka, and Rainer Maria Rilke, connect the diverse media that Dill employs. Paper, wire, horsehair, photography, foil, bronze, and music comprise elements through which the artist conveys the complexities of communication. Dill challenges the viewer to confront our linguistic relationships as well as perceptions of language itself.
Raised in Maine, Dill received her Master of Arts from Smith College in 1974, and her Master of Fine Arts from Maryland Institute College of Art in 1980. She soon emerged as a sculptor and multi-media artist. Her interest in language and allusions to strong feminine identity reflect her friendship with the late artist, Nancy Spero (1926 - 2009), who used text and depictions of the female form, often appropriated as classical goddesses, in her scroll paintings.
She has received a John Simon Guggenheim fellowship in addition to the Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant, and National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, among others. Her opera, Divide Light, based on the poems of Emily Dickinson, was performed in San Jose in 2008. In April of 2018, the New Camerata Opera Company performed a revised version in New York City.
Dill's artworks are in the collections of over fifty museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art New York, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. The artist lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.