Michelle Forsyth recalls that she came face-to-face with danger at a young age; from age eight until age sixteen she lived on a sailboat every summer with her family. Forsyth recalls how every day was filled with anxiety: helping her father steer clear of rocks, battling the winds, and fear of shipwrecks. The disaster novels about shipwrecks her father left laying around didn’t help ease her anxiety either. Years later this childhood anxiety and danger would transform into inspiration for her art.
Forsyth, USM’s Visiting-Artist-in-Residence has turned the USM Art Gallery in Gorham into a working studio for her latest installation titled “Canopy”, which she is creating with the help of USM art students. It depicts the disaster of Maine’s 1947 fires. Using thousands of tiny cut out pieces of paper and sequins pinned to and spilling down from the ceiling, it will provide a view of a forest canopy as seen from below.
Forsyth began to get interested in disaster images when she began graduate school in 2001. She began to collect clippings and images of disasters from newspapers and websites, which began to inspire her art that depicts scenes of death or destruction.
She attributes this fascination with such images back to her childhood years on the sailboat.
“When you live on a sailboat you really get a sense of nature. The vistas of these amazing waterscapes influenced my practices, as well as the idea that you are immersed in nature. A lot of my work also stems from images I see of disaster, like images from places like the New York Times and ogorish.com,” said Forsyth.
She said there were many photographers who inspired her to create art from horrific images of death and disaster. She described looking at the work of Andres Serrano, who is famous for his photographs of corpses at morgues and Izima Kaoru, a fashion photographer famous for depicting his models as if they were dead. She found herself wanting to transform these horrific images into something beautiful, into art. She began to do needlepoint and paintings based on some of these images.
Forsyth cited that one thing that has always been important to her art is the process. She was inspired early by artists who had long and complex processes to their work, such as Yayoi Kusama who often painted on nets, sometimes for 40 hours at a time without a break. Her experience has led Forsyth to take on projects that take a long time to complete.
“I am very enamored by the process of making work and I often spend a couple of months completing one project,” said Forsyth.
The images of death and destruction that she had surrounded herself with for years did at one point begin to deeply affect her so much she needed a break.
“The images of death and blood really started to affect me psychologically. I started getting really emotionally affected by my work,” said Forsyth.
To cope she took a break from this subject matter and began a second body of work on a different concept to give herself a break. She began to do paintings of ocean scenery, mostly inspired from her childhood at sea.
Soon however, she found herself once again wanting to transform images of death and disaster into art.
She is currently in the middle of a project back home in her studio titled the One Hundred Drawings Project. In this series of work Forsyth decided she actually wanted to go acquire her own images to work from. She has been collecting images of disasters from the last 100 years in the US, and then she takes pilgrimages back to the disaster sites and takes her own photos. She’ll then create the paintings from both images.
Out of the 100 intended paintings, so far she has documented 30 sites and completed 20 paintings. Each of the paintings in the series also has an accompanying narrative that tells the story of the disaster.
“I’m really interested in the personal stories that go along with each of the disasters,” said Forsyth.
The exhibit she is working on here at USM is on the same subject as the rest of her work, but in some ways is unlike anything she has ever done. Rather than working by herself, Forsyth has had the help of USM art students in creating Canopy. She said she has thoroughly enjoyed the collaboration of the students so far.
“We’ll be filling in the entire canopy by March 20th,” said Forsyth.
She also states that her students have been extremely helpful and insightful; one of her students even suggested the material for the basis of canopy.
“It’s nice to have that interaction with students because then I have this body of people that have this knowledge of different materials. I learn a lot about my work from students that come in,” said Forsyth.
This installation is the largest piece of art Forsyth has ever done.
“It’s my Mount Everest,” she said.
This is also the first time Forsyth has created an exhibit with the public watching the process, rather than creating in the privacy of her own studio. So far though, she has enjoyed the challenge.
“I wanted to challenge myself and put myself out there in a way I’ve never done before,” said Forsyth.
Visitors are welcome to come watch Michelle Forsyth work in the Gorham gallery and meet her from 1-4 p.m. on Fridays and 1-5 p.m. on Saturdays through March 20, 2009.
Canopy will be on exhibit in the Gorham art gallery through April 8, 2009.