Shelley Horton-Trippe

• Biography
• Artist's Statement
• Critique
• Academic RÉsumÉ

Artist's Statement

The art work is, to be sure, a thing that is made, but it says something other than the mere thing itself is, allo agoreuei. The work makes public something other than itself; it manifests something other; it is an allegory. In the work of art something other is brought together with that thing that is made. To bring together is, in Greek, sumballein. The work is a symbol.

The Origin of the Work of Art
Martin Heidegger

Whether it be historically referential or allegorical and derived from site specificity, or purely metaphoric and interested in the material as metaphor, my work is always a personal inquiry reaching towards the universal.

In my early examination of female-artist roles in the installation-video- performance series ("Housework/Artwork," 1974-1979) I am examining my place as a young woman in art school and how that pertains to the male dominant culture. The link-up of more literary interests in the body of work ("The Poem Paintings," 1991-1993) continues as an exploration of my personal relationships with my poet friends' work. In the latter, a study of synesthesia or "cross-sensing" informs the paintings, developed out of a process of listening to the poet recite while directly painting the emotion felt.

This "personalism," however, takes on a more universal climate in the newer paintings and drawings, a more allegorical meaning and imagery. The act of traveling to specific world sites and being moved by these sites sets up a dialectical relationship between work and site. As Craig Owens states in "Beyond Recognition," Allegorical imagery is appropriated imagery; the allegorist does not invent the images but confiscates them. He lays claim to the culturally significant, poses as its interpreter. And in his hands the image becomes something other (allos = other; agoreuei = to speak).

I lay claim to a certain historic footnote and pull it forward through the long corridor of art history and theory and time into the view of the now... to be seen with new eyes, to be digested with newly discovered enzymes.

But my allegory runs in parallel directions, as in the work I created during a time in Malta, I am concerned with native materials as well as native myth. Or the appropriation of a breathtaking view and that of an emotional view, as in the series of work inspired by a 2001 residency at Brantwood, John Ruskin's estate in Northern England. As an example, I appropriated the garden designed after Dante's seven levels of paradise. As well, I appropriated 19th century emotion, culture, political motivation, and mores. I became the 19th century Pre-Raphaelite, wearing long white gowns to the "Painters Grove," a spot where Turner, Ruskin and many others had painted. I join them in this beautiful spot to continue the legacy—there I paint my own series of watercolors, albeit de-constructed.

Place becomes allegory, the act of painting and drawing becomes allegory, and even the artist appropriates both persona and motivation from a period worthy of reevaluation. The culturally significant is pulled out of the mothballs.

But in the most recent work, the pure act of painting and/or drawing becomes most influential. The nature of the reciprocating response becomes the method. The artwork is the product of an infinite chain of causes and effects. I fall into pools of turquoise in a lover's eyes. The process of capturing this intensity becomes the context of a series of phenomena. Yellow pools come before a red, which is the underpainting for blue, then green.

The outcome becomes more abstract, more condensed and monochromatic, as if the primordial stew is cooked down to its essence, a chemical reaction is changing the entropy.