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A journey through artist books

Art of Catherine Nash explores nature, ideas, memories

A simple artist’s book with a few blank pages and a boat skeleton for a centerfold sits quietly in the southern corner of the Durango Arts Center Library. The boat rides vertically inside cotton-rag and seaweed leaves. Lashed willow twigs barely suggest the tiny hull, and wispy strands fall from the branches.

“Turning the Page: A Retrospective of Artist Books by Catherine Nash” has many works that are far more elaborate than “Book Boat” (1999). In fact, “Boat Book II” (2014) dominates the show. It’s a huge, baroque work with big, blank pages unfurling in rhythmic intensity. Large twigs spew out from inside, and you’ll see another twig-boat in the centerfold. It arcs elegantly down and out of the piece like a vigorous animal tail.

Nash created the two works 15 years apart. The first has a tentative stillness; the second is bold and assured. That difference is a discovery worth making, and it’s what retrospectives offer – a chance to find visual paths that connect early experimentation to confident maturity.

Though not presented chronologically, Nash’s works range from 1987 to the present. Born on the East Coast, Nash earned fine arts degrees in New Hampshire and Arizona, where she currently lives. She has done research in Europe, Japan and India.

In her retrospective, you have to make your own connections, and that’s not hard to do. Beautifully crafted, Nash’s work is full of interesting symbolism and tantalizing juxtapositions. She often combines text with varying book formats and clearly has deep interests in nature, philosophy and history.

In a well-written artist statement, Nash tells you as much. She is as fascinated by the night sky as by images, language systems and symbols.

“I use symbols to evoke emotive ideas without the need for the written or spoken word,” she writes. “I strive to interpret my deepest thoughts, dreamings and concerns with this visual poetry.”

In many works, she reveals a specific inspiration, such as the ocean, roots, Thoreau’s journals, Rumi’s poetry, Buddhist hand mudras or the attributes of Catholic saints.

“I am inspired by things that make me wonder,” she writes about “Night Flying,” a large, undulating ceiling piece inspired by her love of the sky.

“Eclipsis Lunar” (2011) arose out of a specific Arizona evening in which, “Wrapped up in a blanket out in my yard in the middle of the night, I experienced a full lunar eclipse,” she writes.

Process is important, and Nash illuminates her way of working. First, something triggers an emotion, idea or memory. An extended period of time apparently follows with sketches, experimentation and a search in which she sorts through various artistic filters.

For most visual artists, the first filter simply is drawing or painting. Many stop there and consider the artistic process complete. But Nash and many contemporary artists go past that first step. She shows us how to further process a vision, idea or experience. She experiments, ruminates and, in the end, comes up with what she calls “poetic assemblage.”

It “allows me a very different window through which to explore deep experiences of nature and the metaphysics of place and memory,” she writes about “Eclipsis Lunar.”

Well into the interpretive process, Nash built a cabinet out of an old box and added wings and pages to create a fantasy stage set of night. Crowning the work with an old school slate, she incorporated a 1552 eclipse diagram and cut mica sheeting to represent two moments. Then, she added branches and more drawing.

What’s unique about this exhibition is that the author gives you a body of work and information about her inspiration and process.

Nash’s beautiful works stand on the twin platforms of earlier developments: collage and surrealism. We haven’t had this level of achievement here in Durango in a very long time.

jreynolds@durangoherald.com. Judith Reynolds is a Durango writer, art historian and arts journalist.

If you go

“Turning the Page: A Retrospective of Artist Books by Catherine Nash,” Durango Arts Center Library, 802 E. Second Ave., 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., Tuesday through Saturday through April 30. For information, call 259-2606 or visit www.durangoarts.org.



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