Ingrid Lilligren

Deliberate failures; playful, how to make a form that evolves in the making?

Photos, Stefan /seskis.

Ingrid Lilligren: Tactile Meditations

Braille has been used in my artwork to explore political, cultural, and social blindness. Developed in 1829 by Louis Braille, it is comprised of a rectangular six-dot cell on its end, with 63 possible combinations using one or more of the six dots. For the sighted, Braille appears as a rhythmic flow of patterns, a visual structure evoking meaning. Viewers can have the experience of being temporarily “othered”.

Several works have words in Braille carved or embossed onto the forms; some use tiles or pegs to spell out a statement. My subjects range from concepts about beauty, to meditations on climate change. Poems by Debra Marquart, Distinguished Professor in Liberal Arts and Sciences at Iowa State University, and outgoing Poet Laureate of Iowa, are used in several pieces.

Appreciations and thanks are owed to those who have brought this to fruition. Museum director Susan Baley whose keen eye, and eagerness to work with me, set us on the path. Milton Severe, director of exhibition design, created the elegant layout. Tilly Woodward provided educational programming and publicity support and Jocelyn Krueger oversees collections and is the registrar. All photos courtesy Grinnell College Museum of Art.

Ingrid Lilligren and Debra Marquart: Gallery Talk & Reading. September 4 th , 4 p.m. in the gallery.

2022-23
Art Innovators Competition, Bioeconomy Institute, Iowa State University

Steel, porcelain, wood, yellow jade, Braille

75” x 36” x 36”

Collaborator: Debra Marquart, Distinguished Professor, Liberal Arts & Sciences; Poet Laureate of Iowa

Marquart’s research into the impact of oil extraction in the Bakken formation in North Dakota on surrounding communities led to her essay Postcards from Boomtown. Braille text on the porcelain urn has excerpts from Marquart’s essay. Lilligren’s research on the geological formations underlying the Bakken formation and canopic jars form the visual component for the project.

While we work to develop alternative sources for fuel and energy, Remembering the Unseen presents the memory of what oil means and meant, and notes we are witnesses to the social consequences of resource extraction. The jar’s form derives from Egyptian canopic containers used to hold vital organs necessary for the afterlife. Each was inscribed with hieroglyphs and had a stylized animal head as the lid. An oil molecule was fashioned from pit-fired porcelain and yellow jade and sits on top of the jar. The plinth uses visual metaphor for the geology of the oil fields.

Containing beauty and awareness of our role in addressing challenges related to climate change, resource allocation, divestment, and development of renewable alternatives to oil, Remembering the Unseen is a work by two colleagues who perform this mysterious cultural function known as artist. On our campus, scientists work intellectually to make the invisible visible. Artists work intellectually and expressively to create visual works of art. If you have ever been moved by any work of art, be it visual, music, dance, poetry or writing, you have experienced a connection to our collective humanity; that which makes us part of communities, groups, and for the time being, this campus. Art doesn’t broadcast, it receives.

Braille text on the jar: extracting a million barrels a day in the Bakken one average month 9.4 billion cubic feet of natural gas flared into the atmosphere call it conflict-free oil, it doesn’t feel conflict-free to me, she says.

June 17, 2021

Ingrid Lilligren

Compelling Ground, Ice Dreams Statement

Compelling Ground: Landscapes, Peoples and Environments of Iowa (January 25 – July 23, 2021) Brunnier Art Museum, Iowa State University. The works explore significant changes to the land and agriculture in the 25 years since Land of the Fragile Giants: Landscapes, Environments, and Peoples was showcased. Adrienne Gennett, Associate Curator of Exhibitions and Education, University Museums, organized the exhibition.

Ice Dreams: The two pieces in this exhibit are part of a quartet each having a statement in Braille related to the melting ice on our planet.

Red Dream states: Without the ice, the earth will fall: Emma Thompson

Blue Dream reads: If you are skating over thin ice, you might as well dance: Anita Shreve

As ice placed into each form melts, it reconfigures the ‘ground’ below. Inspired in part by catastrophic floods in western Iowa in Spring 2020, this project considers the impact of global climate change and how this is altering the physical world we know. The scale of this change reminds me that we are part of a large, complex web and are participants in and witnesses to profoundly significant events.

Red Dream: 71” x 39” x39”. Ceramic, wood, ice, unfired clay, sheet metal. 2020 Blue Dream: 64” x 45” x 30”. Ceramic, wood, ice, unfired clay, sheet metal. 2020

Phase Change, 2019
40” X 8” x 54”
Wood, unfired porcelain, plexiglass, ice, Braille

The changing landscape of ice and snow on the planet gave rise to this piece. Each day, ice placed inside the forms melted, creating unpredictable changes in the unfired clay structures. Over the weeklong duration of the exhibition, the evolving decay in the forms was documented. On the final day of the show, the forms that remained were removed and the unfired clay recycled.

It is thought provoking to visualize what occurs as ice melts and becomes water. The sagging, slowly decaying clay structures, so contained in this temporary work, revealed the relentless, erratic nature of water. The global forces at work are likewise persistent and have already wrought prodigious change.

Braille is used in my artwork to address cultural, political, and social blindness.

Braille text on each cylinder:
1) Phase change describes a dynamic process whereby solids becomes liquid
2) or liquids become a gas. We are witnessing phase change on an
3) unprecedented scale. As the climate warms on our planet, freshwater ice
4) is rapidly melting. Sea levels are rising threatening coastal ecosystems and
5) human habitation. Increasingly fierce weather events bring catastrophic
6) floods and life-threatening heat waves. It is thought provoking to visualize
7) what occurs as ice melts and becomes water. The sagging, slowly decaying
8) clay structures, so contained in this temporary work, revealed the relentless,
9) erratic nature of water. The global forces at work are likewise persistent
10) and have already wrought prodigious change.

Acknowledgements: 3D porcelain printing courtesy of the ISU Construction and Computation Lab; Erin Hunt and Kelly Devitt, assistants; Shelby Doyle, Assistant Professor, Architecture, Director.

Snow Is The Only One Of Us That Leaves No Tracks

Ingrid Lilligren, 2018

72” X 39” x 39”

Wood, unfired clay, plexiglass, ice, Braille

The changing landscape of ice and snow on the planet gave rise to this piece.  Each day, ice placed inside the forms melted creating unpredictable changes in the nine unfired clay structures.  Over the two-week duration of the exhibition, the evolving decay in the forms was closely documented. On the final day of the show, the forms that remained were removed and the unfired clay recycled.  

It is thought provoking to visualize what occurs as ice melts and becomes water.  The sagging, slowly decaying clay structures, so contained in this temporary work, revealed the relentless, erratic nature of water.  The global forces at work are likewise persistent and have already wrought devastating change.

Braille is used in my artwork to address cultural, political, and social blindness.  The title was written in Braille and wrapped across each of the clay forms.

It’s Not Neither, 2016

Porcelain, pit fired

8’ X 38’

In What is Whiteness1, Nell Painter remarked: “The useful part of white identity’s vagueness is that whites don’t have to shoulder the burden of race in America, which, at the least, is utterly exhausting.” Witnessing that exhaustion is deeply distressing. I reflect often on my white identity, its origins and consequences. Her essay was the impetus for my recent ceramic installation It’s Not Neither, incorporating Braille.  The title references Zen philosophy’s inquiry concerning the nature of existence, examining whether our experiences are real or an illusion concluding “its not neither.”  The philosophy holds that there is no duality at the heart of existence, that it’s neither reality nor illusion; we live in a relationship containing inseparably the complexity, contentiousness, conundrums, and wonders of experience.  In this politically expressive project, I make the point that we cannot separate conversations about race in America into strict categories of “white” or “black.” Race, like meaning in art, is culturally constructed. Racial inequality is a persistent blind spot in our otherwise forward-thinking and democratic society.

Porcelain was chosen to produce the Braille text discs; it is prized for its purity, elegance, and whiteness and is associated with hierarchies of value in our culture. Using the primitive technology of pit firing, multiple shades of greys, blacks, and off-whites formed on the discs. This firing process subverts the history attached to porcelain and the resulting color range reflects my view that all humanity is inseparably bound together. Alchemical by its nature, clay persists in holding our interest, compelling intellectual, visceral, and provocative responses to contemporary cultural issues.

1. What is Whiteness, Nell Irvin Painter, NY Times Review, June 20, 2015

Braille text on the wall:

Joan says we need to raise each other’s kids.  Mark says the contrived stereotype must not control the narrative.  Will we listen; see ourselves in one another?

Lake Effect, 2016

Porcelain, mixed media

Poem courtesy of Debra Marquart

50” x 48” x 18”

LAKE EFFECT

snow for days      let it

the weather woman

is always wrong      we rise

these pearl white mornings

made warm by your long back

east of Lake Michigan

unexpected      always coming

great crystal flakes

float outside your windows

white pine branches lowered

heavy with snow      we rise

to the meteorologist’s apologies

this upland peninsula

so shaped like a paw

or an oven mitt

people will raise their hands

a kind of swearing to

and point to the spot

where they’re from      this place

in the heart of the palm

where I found you

a bit left of center

lake effect      people around here say

to things that happen

all the things      wonderful or strange

they can never hope to

predict or explain.

© Debra Marquart

Poor You, 2016

Porcelain, mixed media

Poem courtesy of Debra Marquart

28” X 24” X 12”

Poor You

Back when we were still together, it seemed

my ex-boyfriend could never lose anything. 

Car keys, dollar bills, everything that fell from

his charmed pockets floated back.  Lucky us. 

Check books dropped in grocery store parking lots

delivered to our front door by Good Samaritans

before the ice cream melted.  Perhaps this is why

he treated me with such benign neglect, forgetting

how the slippery dime of me could work through

the stitches of silk pockets. Once, at the therapist’s

he handed the Kleenex box to me with this look

on his face, like poor you, like I was some catastrophe

under glass.  Oh, poor us.  It reminded me of a cartoon

I’d seen in the paper of two men in a sinking canoe. 

The guy in the front end is submerged, taking in water,

already drowning.  The guy in the back of the canoe

is tipped high and dry.  In the caption, he’s thinking,

Boy, am I glad I wasn’t on that end of the boat.

© Debra Marquart

INVISIBLE, 2015

9’ X 125’

Ceramic, mixed media

Woodbury University Hollywood Gallery

Braille text on the wall:

On our planet are substances we exploit to great benefit and unforeseen consequences. I have chosen nine to consider: blood (aids research, ethnic cleansing); salt (chemicals, oceans); gold (currency, mining); air (flight, environmental degradation); soil (food, contamination); DNA (genetics, overpopulation); corn (food, bio-fuels); oil (energy, fertilizer); and water (manufacturing, supply). Commodities, resources, and ideas move easily and rapidly across national boundaries. Will we evolve the social intelligence to better balance our technological intelligence?  Can we continue exploiting resources without dire ramifications? Our deep history as makers on the planet is one we honor; what are we choosing to be making today?

Cottonmouth, 2005

Stoneware, porcelain

60” X 30” X 24”

Braille text on the wall: An Iraqi speaking to an American journalist said, “You took the cotton from our mouths but you put it in your ears.”

Buoy, 2014

Porcelain, laser printed decals
Poem courtesy of Debra Marquart
11” X 28” x 12”

BUOY

And so you came to realize that a married man
is like a drowning victim, when you find him

drenched, adrift and unhappy in the vast ocean
of his marriage, and you will always be the first

to spot him, a floating speck on the horizon
flapping his arms for rescue, desperate mouth

ringing an o above the rolling crests and waves.
You are on the high dry deck of the cruise ship

In your espadrilles and crisp white shorts,
aren’t you the beacon, aren’t you the life preserver.

And when you jump into the sea salt foam,
if only for a refreshing swim, you understand

that he will seize upon you, strong buoyant
swimmer that you are, grab your shoulders,

pull your head under with his weight, so dense
in the water.  And down among the reefs

and coral, with your new copper-coin eyes,
you will see how he rides on the shoulders

of his water-breathing sea horse wife,
and his mermaid mistresses, those water nymph

former lovers, and a whole tag-team pyramid
of three-breasted women who have tried

over the years to save him.  Even then,
next time, when you see another one

go under, does it give you pause,
does it stop you from jumping in—

no, not once, not ever.             

© Debra Marquart

Substances, 2014

Porcelain, Braille

12” high X 7” diameter each

Query: Geodes, 2012

36” x 56” x 34”

Sand, wooden chair, porcelain, gold, earth, blood, corn, oil, water, air, DNA.

Danny Shechtman’s recent Nobel Prize in chemistry for quasicrystal discovery was electrifying.  The Penrose tile pattern beneath the chair is made with sand sifted over tiles to reveal the spaces between the tiles.  Penrose tile patterns are aperiodic in a manner similar to quasicrystals.  The form of the pattern, a large question mark, reflects the base of inquiry common to scientists, artists, humanists, and expresses doubt and hope.

Each of the Geodes on the chair includes nine substances in a porcelain package; gold leaf was applied after firing.  This piece addresses issues related to these: blood (aids, ethnic cleansing); salt (salary, oceans); gold (currency, mining); air (environmental degradation); soil (contamination, ownership); DNA (cloning, overpopulation); corn (bio-fuels, food); oil (energy, fertilizer); and water (access, supply).  We have exploited each to great benefit but with challenging consequences.

Paula Cowgill Gmelch Memorial

Lagomarcino Courtyard, Iowa

State University, Ames, Iowa

Stoneware, 52” x 25” x 25”

In March of 2009, Walt Gmelch asked if I would create a sculpture in memory of his late wife Paula; a great honor. Their son Ben's eulogy and correspondence with Walt provided ideas for the piece

--

a stack of books with titles selected by family members, topped with a basin to catch rainwater. Perennial flowers would bloom in the adjacent planters; the title came from Ben's words; ‘my mom was the best listener I ever knew’. Using Curious George and Peter Pan and the Tiger to begin the stack honored Paula's love of children and her engagement with early childhood education. Little Women played an important role in Paula's (and in my own) early life as a reader. I did take some liberties with proportions to create a more dynamic overall composition.

Enlightenment, 2004

7’ x 24’ x 7”, stoneware

Lagomarcino Hall Courtyard

Iowa State University, Ames, Iowa

An initial concept drawing by Gail Kristensen had been created for this mural and when she was unable to materialize the project, I was selected in 2003 to develop and complete the commission. I elected to work from Kristensen’s plan, making several modifications in the composition and redesigning the installation to create a continuous ceramic work. Students worked with me on this project, which was installed after nearly two years of fabrication and firing.

Babe’s Turn, 2002

7’ x 3’ x 3’

Cor-Ten steel, powder-coated aluminum, copper finial

Bucksbaum Center for the Arts courtyard

Grinnell College

Grinnell, Iowa

For this project memorializing Babe Voertmann I read letters and a video to gain deeper understanding of this unique woman. She was a dynamic, vibrant, expressive, playful and deeply intelligent dance instructor at the college. Her impact on students’ lives impressed me. My response incorporated references to the body, to movement and a whimsical element.

Patterns For Life, 1998

12’ x 15’

ceramic tiles with wood surround

Wallace Foundation Learning and Outreach Center

Lewis, Iowa

The challenge in this project was to construct a mural that would fit onto a curved wall. An exact replica of the wall was built in my studio and the tiles fabricated on the curved surface. Custom underglazes were created for the colors. The imagery reflected the strong graphic lines that are part of the row crop landscape on the Armstrong research farm. A contest was held to name the mural and a local couple were the lucky winners.