Balancing precision with irregularity is the tenet in Elise Ferguson’s richly layered work. Her labor-intensive course of begins with making use of a number of rounds of pigmented Venetian plaster onto panels, that are then drawn over with imperfect tips in graphite to assist register a number of rounds of silkscreened plaster in repeating geometric designs. Embracing this method’s inevitable misalignments and uneven outcomes imbues the works with surprising texture, power, and a palpable sense of contact. Whereas the work initially seem exacting and machine-made, they shortly reveal a hand-hewn high quality that animates and enlivens the surfaces.
Working throughout the language of abstraction, Elise Ferguson repeats and reconfigures modular kinds like musical phrases which are paused, shifted, and subtly rearranged. Her compositions set up a rhythm, however one which welcomes dissonance and improvisation. Borders blur, pencil strains meander and smudge, and the crisp shapes she begins with ultimately vibrate with movement and straying edges. The friction between optical readability and materials actuality lends Ferguson’s work a quiet emotional cost and an surprising resonance that borders on the non secular.
Ferguson’s work relay a lifelong fascination with textiles and in addition spotlight a deep appreciation of Nineteenth-century Shaker designs. One drawing particularly, An Emblem of the Heavenly Sphere, by Polly Collins from 1854, straight impressed Ferguson’s portray, Shaker. The geometric symbolism and repetition in Collin’s work offered its maker a devotional achievement that Ferguson additionally channels in her follow. By bridging her simple need for imperfection with mechanical readability, a novel threshold is crossed that quietly highlights the artist’s distinctive imaginative and prescient and psyche.
