The Spirit of the Matter: The Work of Kelly Sturhahn

By Dominique Nahas

Kelly Sturhahn engages with a variety of forms and materials including two dimensional work such as drawings and paintings and three dimensional forms that are often site specific installations while using a variety of processes (cutting, hanging, punching, stamping, stitching, pouring, printing) and materials (paper, lace, sequins, mirrored plastic, heat transfers, ink, watercolor, polymer pigments). The activities of mark making, coloring, cutting, tracing, masking, layering, veiling, folding, slicing, and pinning all contribute to an awareness of the workings of perception and its shifts. The artist’s methodologies and procedures are at the service of creating art-forms, small, intimate works and large installation pieces (as in Blue Becomes You, 2011 and Night Fall, 2012) that contain modular repeated elements or stage-like settings consisting of different forms working together to create an overall gestalt often alluding to the presence of an intelligent system in the creative throes of self-organization. Sturhahn initiates a re- appearance of space and volume through her installations, using what she calls “intricate craftwork on a grand scale.”

Through her various processes she attends to the character of perception and the dialectics of seeing — which involves us, as viewers, appreciating the intricacies and the mechanics of appearances and disappearances— in her work as her work.  In order to do so she excavates the sensual foundations of visual language, particularly that of the haptic as a mode of visuality, that is, where the eyes almost function as organs of touch. In the end Kelly Sturhahn’s visual practice alludes to natural forms (suggestive of landscape elements) or to natural processes intimating the forces of order and/ or entropy (solidification, efflorescence, proliferation, flickering, separation, lifting, compression, dripping, layering) or to visual phenomenon and their structural appearances in nature and of nature such as reflections, shadows, patterns.

Each of these facets of lived-experience (meaning: felt experience) as they are all grist for the perceptual mill draw our attention to the realization that ordinary experience, such as walking in a field of grass or under skies or under a canopy of trees, or walking through one’s home or on a street is inherently complex (and in some respects utterly mystifying). Sturhahn has been very much affected by the developing pictorial codes of landscape painting in history, being drawn, for example, to the work of the German Romanticist Casper David Friedrich, and by the Hudson River School painters in North America. What connects these painters and Sturhahn is the search for the unknowable. Through her various works the artist has gotten involved in her tracking her own susceptibilities and sensibilities as they relate to the dual conditions of immanence and of sublimity.

Sturhahn’s vision, then, bespeaks of the experience of the noumenal, of the revelatory, of the marvelous, of the apparitional. The novelist John Fowles in a passage in his notebooks echoes some of the dream-like conditions that Sturhahn brings up in her visual art. He alludes to the de-corporealized state in which the individual ego melds into that of the world’s: “ In some mysterious way woods have never seemed to me to be static things, in physical terms I move through them; yet in metaphysical ones, they seem to move through me.” Fowles’s literary remarks bring up sensorial attributes that Sturhahn refers to in her own work. Both artists, literary and visual, refer in their own way to the dissolving of the walls of the subjective ego and the permeable spatiality of the body and the condition of motility as the body displaces itself through nature and through time and place. These factors point to the sensuous dimension of the intersubjective world of life, our immediately lived experience as we live it, prior to all our thoughts about it. Kelly Sturhahn’s art practice, marked as it is by an intentionality to create a multisensory experience for the viewer, deepens our appreciation of how deeply intertwined our lives are with the world’s life.

Dominique Nahas is an independent curator and critic based in Manhattan.