Exploring the Invisible
Curator Heather Ferrell, Curator and Director of Exhibitions BCA
Venue: Burlington City Arts
Exhibition Date: February 21, 2020 - June 7, 2020
Exploring the Invisible features a room-size installation of nearly 2,000 ceramic tiles and 19 felted-wool panels made by the artist. The minimalism of Varadi’s art and rawness of her materials belies an intensively laborious process. Instilled with a meditative rhythm, she repeats the same gesture several thousand times as a tile is formed, or wool felted.
The felted raw wool panelling made from Navajo Churro wool, sourced from Shelburne Farms and accompanied by single-channel video, excerpts from conversations with Sam Dixon, Dairy Farm Manager and Renee LaCoss, Herdsman.
The tiles made, after months of research developing the clay body and wood ash glaze, from the clay found at Shelburne Farms and the glaze made from the historic, more than 200 years old, cottonwood trees, taken down at Shelburne Farms.
In 2019, Varadi visited Shelburne Farms as a BCA artist-in-residence where she interviewed staff and researched the site’s history and farming practices. Through a series of workshops, she led community members in creating handmade tiles as she engaged them in conversations on sustainability and cultural heritage.
Interweaving notions of fine art and craft, labor and heritage, Varadi connects us to the importance of tradition in an era of mass-production and global economies.
Brigitta Varadi’s video is one of two video components featured in her room-size installation Exploring the Invisible. It captures the laborious practice of processing clay sourced locally from Shelburne Farms to transform it into hand-built tiles emulating historical tiles that were once mass-produced in the late 19th century.
Brigitta Varadi, Exploring the Invisible (video component), 2020. Courtesy of the Artist.
Video footage of the removal of historic cottonwood trees at Shelburne Farms was contributed by Marshall Webb, Carbon Drawdown Coordinator, Shelburne Farms, VT (2019).
Brigitta Varadi’s research-based artist residency and workshops are a partnership between Burlington City Arts and Shelburne Farms. Combining the missions of both organizations, the artist will lead conversations about social and cultural issues impacting the Vermont landscape and its community, culminating in a BCA Center exhibition in 2020.
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Community Tile Making with Brigitta Varadi at the Shelburne Farm
Date: July 20 - 21, 2019
