Sarah Shepard Gallery is pleased to announce Out at Sea, a group show featuring works by Lauren Bartone, Diane DallasKidd, Dora Somosi, and Lena Wolff. The diverse pieces included in Out at Sea span from photography to textile work, brought together by a shared interest in handiwork and a reverence for botanical materials. While Bartone, DallasKidd, and Wolff are local to the San Francisco Bay Area—Marin and Berkeley, respectively—Somosi joins from the East Coast, living and working in Brooklyn, NY. These four artists draw inspiration from quiltmaking, weaving, and the land, nimbly displayed in Bartone’s hand-dyed and sewn linen and cotton canvases, DallasKidd’s thread-bound works, Somosi’s embroidered cyanotypes, and Wolff’s hand-cut collage. A shared love of blue hues also threads through the works included in Out at Sea: they compliment each in their material structure, offering a measured antidote to aimlessness.
Three of Somosi’s hand-embroidered cyanotypes, Mending Sugar and Mending Kamani 1 and 2, are featured in Out at Sea. These embroidered works were born out of Somosi’s By Her Side series, a collection of cyanotypes of trees from the homes and studios of influential women artists and thinkers. The Mending pieces put an enchanting spotlight on the branches and vegetation of the trees with their moon-like framing and embroidered embellishments, which take on a tint from botanical dyes, such as madder root, which Somosi uses to hand-dye thread. As a Hungarian-American artist, Somosi’s use of embroidery, integral to Mending, reflects a tradition deeply rooted in Hungarian folk art where women expressed creativity, identity, and connection through embroidery. These layers of history unfold in Somosi’s images, interrupted and heightened by her embroidered additions.
Bartone’s textile-inspired canvases also highlight the meeting point between botanicals and histories, creating stories in the seams. Bartone’s work is informed by her concurrent pursuit of a doctorate in Italian Studies, through which she considers narratives of Italian national identity and cultural exchange. These histories—and the histories of craft and creativity, particularly within domestic settings—shape her patchwork canvases, January and Weave and Dodge. Bartone uses dyes such as indigo, weld, walnut, and kermes to color the cotton and linen swatches, which are sewn and hand-stretched. Somewhere between painting and textile, these structured canvases weave together history, color, practice, and material.
In harmony with Bartone and Somosi’s pieces, Wolff’s nearly 5×4 foot hand-cut paper collage, Landscape (Eames Ranch), returns to her distinctive lexicon, strongly rooted in aesthetic and practice of American quiltmaking: geometric forms, radiating shapes, and cross-stitches bound by the grids. This momentous piece was completed during the inaugural Ranch Studio Artist Residency at the Eames Institute’s Petaluma ranch. Through the support of the Institute’s agricultural program, Wolff had the opportunity to engage in foraging and dye-making, a process in parallel with both Bartone and Somosi’s practice. The patchwork of periwinkle squares in Landscape pulls out the vibrant prussian blue of Somosi’s cyanotypes and the earth-tones of Bartone’s canvases.
DallasKidd’s practice shares an interest in both craft and natural dye processes, taking particular inspiration from Japanese textile techniques. Traditional dye and textile methods provide a foundation for DallasKidd’s cloth and fiber-based work, which explores the boundaries and seams of craft and contemporary art. Constellation, included in Out at Sea, uses linen threads and acrylic paint to make a textured web of indigo, dotted with strobe-like stars of white. These wayfinding icons—stars, moons, and grids—appear across the works in Out at Sea, which are anything but adrift. Bound by blue hues, a shared appreciation for handcraft, and a dedication to material structure, these pieces evoke progression and sureness, suggesting ways to navigate the seemingly current, constant, and collective feeling of losing one’s bearings.
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