I turned 45 last Saturday and spent the week with my family at Oak Island, NC. Each day I indulged in multiple trips to the beach to run or walk or swim or just jump over waves. I read a lot and caught some of Roland-Garros. It was pretty great!
In the studio I’ve been working on a painting commission of skiers and I think it’s done. I’m starting an intimidating weaving project next, and I’ll share when things are under way and I have images to show.
If you haven’t had a chance to check out my show at the Sawtooth School, it’s up until July 12th. You’ll find drawings, collages, textiles, installation, and video on themes of changing ecology.
Jessica Singerman Collages at Sawtooth School ExhibitSummer has begun! This is “Cold Water.” It’s 30×40 inches oil on canvas and available here.
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.
Thanks to everyone who made it out to the opening reception for my show “Cloud Girl Accidentally Eats Rainbow” and a big thank you to the entire Sawtooth School for Visual Art team for believing in me and for all the work they put into helping bring this exhibit to life. I’m grateful.
I was delighted to see people excited to take a paper crane and children using them as shadow puppets with my video projections – and gleefully playing on my fabric boulders. The exhibit features 2 large series of works on paper, which I displayed unframed for the first time. That kind of vulnerability was appropriate for the show, and I was happy to be able to share less precious – and touchable! – work in contrast to these.
What’s next? I’m not sure yet, but we have such a rich history of textiles in NC…. I’m dreaming of more and bigger reclaimed fabric boulders – again made in community – and shown in an unused textile factory… If anyone knows of such a place, please let me know!
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”
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
After last week’s “snowmageddon,” today’s downright balmy weather feels like a gift. Sitting on my back porch in the warm sun, I’m looking at the shapes between the trees and the sky and the ground.
I made a series of paintings based on drawings of chairs and a table and trees I drew on this back porch when I was imagining creating spaces for conversation… I was inspired by a painting of a chair that Richard Diebenkorn made years ago, and he in turn was inspired by an Henri Matisse painting. This makes them my art grandpas if you will. I like thinking of the line of artists who inspire younger artists – this artistic lineage is reassuring in a way.
Scroll down to see one of the paintings from this series, and then the Diebenkorn and Matisse works below it.
Petals fall in the pond 2, oil on panel, 14×11 inchesRichard Diebenkorn, Interior with Doorway, 1962, oil on on canvas, 70 3/8 x 59 1/2 inHenri Matisse, View of Notre Dame, 1914, oil on canvas
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.
For the last couple of months, I’ve been dyeing hundreds of handkerchiefs using natural dyes as I work on a project for a show in the spring. So far I have successfully worked with madder, weld, cochineal, pomegranate, myrobalan, cutch, various parts of the oak tree, walnut, and indigo.
I waited to work with indigo till I had some experience under my belt. It’s a trickier dye to work with than others because it’s insoluble in water and has to be reduced to a water-soluble form. To make an indigo vat, you have to follow steps to create the chemical reactions needed for the indigo to convert to a dye rather than a pigment.
To make the indigo vat, you have to create an alkaline environment in the vat (adding lye or soda ash to the water for example), remove the oxygen (adding thiourea dioxide in my case), add the indigo “starter” you made earlier, check the pH, adjust the pH to the correct one for the fiber you’re dyeing, then you can start. You then adjust the vat as needed each work session, adding the necessary ingredients for each chemical change to occur.
Other colors are much easier to work with and just involve steeping dyestuff for hours or days.
What’s been so exciting about working with indigo the last 2 weeks is that I’ve added a whole side of the color spectrum to my handkerchief palette. I’ve been able to overdye reds and yellows to make a range of turquoise, greens, violets, and lavenders. If you look at the images below, you’ll notice that some of the handkerchiefs are much darker than others. This involves dipping the hankies multiple times in the indigo, anywhere from 5 seconds to 5 minutes at a time. And the magic of indigo is that when you take fabric out of the vat, it comes out yellow or green and only turns blue in contact with air. It oxidizes over the course of the next 30 minutes to reach its peak blueness. You can then dip it in the vat again to make it darker and bluer.
Giving fabric time to soak in the indigo vat.A range of colors using indigo alone and overdyed on myrobalan and weld.A range of colors using indigo overdyed on pomegranate and weld.A range of colors using indigo overdyed on cochineal and matter.
