Into a Kind of Quietness at Analog Diary 2024
Into a Kind of Quietness at Analog Diary
Beatrice Modisett’s practice is guided by an abiding interest in the inherent tension, space, and overlap between generative and destructive forces; through this lens, Modisett explores themes relating to place, memory, systems, and material.
Modisett’s process is driven by experience and exposure – specifically amid nature, on her heavily wooded, off-the-grid property in Summit, NY, where she spends periods of time sleeping outside, observing, exploring, and otherwise entangling herself with the place while gathering materials that ultimately comprise her work. Modisett’s engagement with her chosen media directly reflects and sustains the overarching concerns through which she approaches art making: that is, that natural forces of destruction – e.g. fire, wind, and water – can simultaneously be means of creation.
In Modisett’s works, charcoal, derived of spent wood from camp fires in Summit, hovers and jumps across sheets of cold press, gray toned paper, building into iterative images that evoke clouds, archways, tents, receding paths, whirlwinds, nests, and tumbling stones. Modisett builds up and draws down these surfaces in an intuitive orchestration, using her hands and fingers in collaboration with the charcoal itself to develop planar activity. The works’ frames, wrought by Modisett from charred and hand-stained wood, also embody her haptic approach. Just as wind and water extract, from tree to earth, the branches that are collected and assembled into the most dimensional frames here, the finely-tuned process involved in hand-staining the others with natural materials exemplifies a chemical transformation; throughout, Modisett’s destruction-as-creation proposition is reflected upon. That the artist’s hand is omnipresent is no coincidence; rather, Modisett’s strategies deliberately reinforce the truth that we, humans, are not distinct from but rather are innately connected to our environments.