Fortune’s Moving

Curatorial statement by Chelsea Smith

The title of this exhibition, Fortune’s Moving, engages with the act of creating within a damaged planet where all people are mortal and vulnerable to the vagarities of luck and chaos. Rather than being maudlin, these works explore the universal dual nature of what it means to sometimes suffer within a body and to give as joyfully as possible.

In the words of the English poet John Lydgate (c.1370–1450):

The enuyous ordre of fortunat meuyge
 In worldly thynge false and flykerynge
 Ne wyll nat suffre vs in this present life
 To lyven in reste without werre or strife
 For she is blynde fykell and unstable
 And of hir course false and full mutable

The envious order of Fortune’s moving, In worldly things false and vacillating. None will not suffer it in this present life, To live in rest without war and strife. For she is blind, fickle, unstable, And her course is false and mutable.

Exhibiting works from six contemporary artists, all of the artists have a common interest in organic materials and unique idiosyncratic approaches to woven forms; whether conventionally on a loom, loosely through sculptural materials or through interlocking patterns.

Working with the idea of a swiftly tilting order of luck, I am reminded of Em Kettner’s central motif of the bed as a repository of the cycles of life, of chance and of health. In Kettner's own words, “That’s why I keep returning to the bed: whether during birth, sex, sickness, or death, there, our sense of the body expands to encompass someone else or something else.” Kettner is an artist and writer based in Ohlone Territory/Richmond, California.

Another Richmond based artist, Felicia Griffin is a studio artist practicing at NIAD Art Center, an art studio for neurodivergent and disabled artists. Griffin’s practice encompasses a sharp eye for color combinations, collections, an enthusiasm for trying new techniques and joy in communal studio work. Griffin shares a key motive in her work: “I started doing this: giving gifts. I am always looking out for who needs help.”

Travis Meinolf has created a site-specific hand woven tent which encourages rest, refuge in beauty and quiet contemplation. Meinolf is the founder of Meinolf Weaving School based in San Anselmo, California.

Noel Maghathe is a queer, mixed Palestinian-American performance artist and curator based in Cincinnati, Ohio. Maghathe has created wax sculptures dipped meticulously by hand for Fortune’s Moving which are suggestive of woven fences. These fences yield an inability to enforce borders due to their delicate and temporal material. Maghathe shares that for them, “The wax, once hardened, can represent a barrier but will always melt away.” This, in turn, connects “to the time passing through a melting candle as well as the ongoing resistance from Palestinians waiting to be free.”

Drawing parallels with Maghathe’s inquiries into themes of time, nature and utility, Lilly Powell is a Kansas City based artist whose practice encompasses ceramic sculpture, functional pottery and mixed media sculpture. She shares that she uses “geological fossils (like impressions, marks, and ghost images) to reference time and accumulation on surfaces commonly seen and regularly touched.”

Also based in Kansas City, Ashley Arnett-Shipley is a textiles artist who is interested in broad macro visions of space and time. Utilizing sewing, dyeing, marbling and quilting, she shares that her work is, “Kindred to the unseen network of each human being to the universe, I view each form as a link, or connection, of a single entity to the greater whole.”

Dedicated to Laura DeAngelis and Erika Martinez (gone too soon)

Curator’s reading list:

Medieval Bodies, Jack Hartnell (2018)
The Girl Green As Elderflower, Randolph Stow (1980)
John Lydgate Poems, John Lydgate (1494)
A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Fourteenth Century, Barbara Tuchman (1978) The Once and Future Sex, Eleanor Janega (2023)
Hamnet, Maggie O’Farrell (2020)
Images in the Margins (Medieval Imagination), Margot Nishimura (2009)