I spent a few days last week camping at the Davidson Riverin Pisgah National Forest, riding bikes, hiking, and soaking in the river with old and new friends. We enjoyed it so much that we decided to meet there again next year at the same time.
And on the studio side of things… if you haven’t had a chance to see my work at the Sawtooth School for Visual Art in Winston-Salem, there’s another week left to catch the exhibit “Cloud Girl Accidentally Eats Rainbow.”
The show features drawings, collages, textiles, installation, and video projects on themes of changing ecology.
The last day of the show is Saturday July 12th. The Davis Gallery is open M-F 9am – 7pm and Saturday 9am – 4pm.Sawtooth will be closed this Friday July 4th and Saturday July 5th for the holiday.
Image Credits: Sawtooth School of Visual Art
Textile Installation and CollagesJessica Singerman – A NC Landscape drawn and undrawn 9 times – video project
Last October 2024, Brooke Musterman (of the Let’s Talk Art with Brooke podcast) and I had an interesting conversation, and now you can listen to it on her website here or on Apple podcasts here.
Among other things, we talked about whether art school is necessary or not, how to make work about challenging subjects, and my current show at the Sawtooth School in Winston-Salem, NC.
Making one of the imaginary topography drawings in my current show
This is a glimpse of the work in my show “Cloud Girl Accidentally Eats Rainbow” currently up at Sawtooth School for Visual Art in Winston-Salem, NC.
The exhibit features video, collage, drawing, textiles, and installation works that explore our relationship to the ephemeral and ever-shifting natural world.
Spurred by climate change and ongoing geopolitical concerns, with this work I’m exploring distinctions of permanence and impermanence, as well as the delicate balance between chaos and order.
The show is up until July 2025 at the Sawtooth School for Visual Art in Winston-Salem, NC.
This week my solo exhibit Cloud Girl Accidentally Eats Rainbow opens in the Davis Gallery at the Sawtooth School for Visual Art in Winston-Salem, NC.
The reception is Thursday April 17th 6-8PM.
The exhibition will remain on view until July 12, 2025.
Through textiles, drawing, video, and collage, Cloud Girl Accidentally Eats Rainbow explores distinctions of permanence and impermanence, offering artworks that have evolved from contemplation, play, and concern.
At work on the drawing portion of my piece “From one happiness to another” beside the video project “A North Carolina landscape drawn and undrawn nine times”
The installation of my exhibit Cloud Girl Accidentally Eats Rainbow continued this week at the Sawtooth School of Visual Art. We invited community volunteers to help me make boulders, large bundles of textiles that are compressed and tied together. I started making these a couple of years ago while experimenting with reclaimed fabric at Penland School of Craft, and wanted to include more and bigger ones in this show. They sit heavy on the floor in my sculpture work Boulder field.
I’m particularly pleased with this boulder-making experience because last summer I decided I wanted to make more work collaboratively and with community. The two events that the Sawtooth School held brought in people who were genuinely curious about the process, and who were happy to put in the physical effort needed to tightly bundle all of these materials. It was a real pleasure to make these as a group.
Thank you to all the volunteers who came out to help and to our community partners who generously donated the large quantities of scrap fabric needed to make these!
The opening reception is April 17th 6-8pm in the Davis Gallery at the Sawtooth School for Visual Art.
Jessica Singerman and volunteer Ann Rowe-Davis working on a textile boulderVolunteers Russ Dubois, Rebecca Silberman, and Betsy Messick making textile bouldersArtist Jessica Singerman and volunteers Katie Barber, Toni Bryja, and Nicole Cochran working together to make a textile boulderTensioning and tying down all the fabricAll hands on deck!Artist Jessica Singerman and volunteers Katie Barber, Toni Bryja, and Nicole Cochran working together to make a textile boulderJessica Singerman and her niece Alex Singerman Driggs celebrating Alex’s boulder-making prowess
The installation of my upcoming exhibit Cloud Girl Accidentally Eats Rainbow started this week. The first two days were focused on installing Children of the Clouds, the suspended textile work featuring 200 individually dyed handkerchiefs. You can read more about this project here and here.
If you’re interested in behind the scenes, here are some photos documenting the process. I roughly calculated that I went up and down that ladder 500 times in the 8 hours of work to tie and hang all of the hankies. Thankfully I had two assistants doing all of the thread measuring and tying knots to tiny safety pins.
Installation continues this week and next for the rest of the work in the show.
The opening reception is April 17th 6-8pm in the Davis Gallery at the Sawtooth School for Visual Art.
up in the cloudsalmost done!Artist Assistants Finley Billstone and Lex Piper200 hankies ready to be installed200 hankies waiting for their placemy concept drawing for the installation – the plan for the whole exhibit is on the right
I’m happy to share that Linea South End luxury apartments has acquired four of my paintings (below) for their thoughtfully curated project in Charlotte, NC. Thanks to their team and to Sugarlift for the collaboration.
Wild in the heaven of earth, acrylic and oil on canvas, 40 x 40 inches
Maker of all things, acrylic and oil on canvas, 40 x 40 inches
Living in the sky, acrylic and oil on canvas, 40 x 40 inches
Midsummer Morning, acrylic and oil on canvas, 40 x 40 inches
This Wednesday January 15th, I’m giving a talk as part of Artists’ Network‘s Professional Development Seminar series. During this session, we’ll focus on getting unstuck and building or reigniting a daily art-making practice for the year ahead.
You’ll learn how to carve out time for your art, stay inspired when life gets busy, spark new ideas, and adapt your workspace—whether you’re traveling or working without a dedicated studio.
If you’re ready to embrace your creative goals and make 2025 your most artistic year yet, this workshop is for you!
Happy New Year! I just got back from a walk with my kitten Luna in a cat backpack. Yes, I am now that person who walks their cat in the neighborhood.
I’ve been on winter break and I’ve got a few days ’til the start of spring semester in the School of Film at UNCSA. It’s been nice to have the time and mental bandwidth to retool the classes I’m teaching and to work in the studio, where I’ve got several projects going on.
As we speak, I’m soaking River Birch bark (foraged with a friend) to extract some color and dye the last few hankies I kept aside. You may notice an open container of gesso, a sort of acrylic primer to prepare a birch wood panel for a painting. To get the surface ready to paint on, I applied four thin coats of gesso, sanding in between each one to make a bright white, opaque, smooth surface to work on. I’m looking forward to making this painting. It was commissioned at the end of the year by North Carolina Museum of Art (NCMA) Winston-Salem, specifically for the Hanes House.
In the last image, you’ll see a screenshot of an in-progress edit of a video piece I’m working on for my upcoming show in the spring. Some of my students were kind enough to help me out for this project and let me shoot their hands while they made an ink drawing of a landscape in Todd, a small community outside of Boone, NC, that saw a lot of damage during Hurricane Helene.
The previous two images are of ink drawing experiments I’m doing to figure out a series of works hopefully for the spring show. In the last few years I’ve made some drawings and paintings of plastic bags and crumpled up paper, but nothing I really dug into. Now I’m making drawings of plastic bags again, this time imagining a large group of them hanging together in a series as sort of imaginary topographies. We’ll see where it goes.
