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Poetter Hall was purchased by the SCAD founders in March 1979. Classes began in September of that year.  
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The Arts

An interview with Kristy Deetz



"Hand book" displays the rich textures and elaborate processes of artist Kristy Deetz.

By Carolina Blatt
Published: Friday, February 2, 2001

Peer through the windows of Exhibit A Gallery and you’ll see just the tip of an artistic iceberg. The Bull street gallery is currently occupied by "Earth Texts," a multifaceted body of work by former SCAD professor Kristy Deetz. "Earth Texts" delivers mossy colors, lively textures and plenty of deeper meaning in cohesive diptych-style woodcarvings. Formally pleasing and conceptually strong, "Earth Texts" is surprisingly both whimsical and profound.

Deetz taught foundation studies, mixed media, painting and drawing classes at SCAD from 1989-91. She is currently teaching at the University of Wisconsin, Green Bay, and at several workshops around the country including Anderson Ranch in Colorado and Ox-Bow, the Chicago Art Institute’s summer program. "Earth Texts" will be on display through March 25 at Exhibit A, 342 Bull St. A reception will be held Feb. 22, 5-7 p.m. Here’s what Deetz had to say about her work:

Carolina Blatt: Tell me about the premise of "Earth Texts."

Kristy Deetz: It started with a couple of things. When you see them on the wall they look like heavy chunks of wood. They almost look like I chopped off a side of a tree. I wanted them to look as if they were cut out of nature. They are also playing off of an open book. There are two halves to them, like a book that’s been opened, like pieces of earth that you’re reading. They refer to books that you read, and in that sense they are operating as visual text and referring to the text of a book. A lot of the titles are playing off of parts of books like "Table of Contents," or things that you find in books like "Palimpsest" or "Missing Leaf." They are visual puns because they refer back to nature in some way. Many of them have to do with our relationships with others, our relationship to nature. "Aporia" means gap between meanings of text in literary theory terms. That could be a gap between the way two people think. It could be a physical gap between a person located in one place and a person located in another place. It could be the gap between us and a fragile connection to nature. So you have those three things — the personal, the natural or ecological, and the literary woven in together.

CB: It is a nice show because it has so many levels to it. Many of the titles in "Earth Texts" are plays on words. How did you arrive at this concept?

KD: I was working in diptychs for a long time and I thought ‘how can I make the diptych more significant as a form?’ I thought ‘A book is open, an open book has two sides to it.’ That’s how I made the formal connection with that idea. The formal connection being those two pieces making up one unit.

CB: What comes first, the concept or the object?

KD: Usually the concept. With the book pieces I start with the title. I think ‘"Table of Contents," I like that. How can I take my material and processes and make that book?’ Sometimes it starts more openly. For example, I knew I wanted to include hair in one of them and I thought ‘how can I do that?’ because I let my hair grow really long — way long, down to my butt — and then I chop it off every so often. Then I let it grow really long again and I chop it off. It’s almost like a passage of my own aging. So I cut it off last summer, boy it had a lot more gray in it. I’m going to make another piece that has my hair in it. I was thinking about linking up ideas of hair with ideas of books, so I thought of different kinds of books. There are collections of tales. Tales can be a story or a ponytail. "Collected Tales" is playing off of those two things. I’m going to do a piece soon using the idea of fall. Having a piece of hair fall, but fall can also be autumn. I might utilize the idea of getting older and the way autumn things die, so maybe there will be some gray in the hair. It took me awhile to figure that one out because I wanted to use the hair and I thought of the story of Adam and Eve and the fall and I played around with that one for awhile. I thought of making a piece about Eve and the apple and making it empowering to Eve, but that didn’t really work. So I think I’m going to try this other way, with the passage of time.

CB: So this is a project that you continue to pursue?

KD: Yes, I’ve worked on this for a number of years. I did a bunch of them intensely together for a number of year, I think it was after I left Savannah College of Art and Design. I did a number of them and really focused on that series. Since then I do a couple every now and then and add to the series. Part of the series includes some books based on women’s lives. Those aren’t represented in the show and I’m not sure if I want to continue that part of it or not. They’re really hard, the hardest artwork I’ve ever had to do. I interview women that I know pretty well and we sum up sort of where they are in their life at that time and often times I’ll look in their purse or they will show me some object that is really important to them. So I use that as a key to make the book. I have a book based on a woman from the south, she’s living up here in Green Bay. It has fans in it because they represent the south. While we were talking it was hot and she was fanning herself. She carried a tiger’s eye in her wallet because she thought it was something significant. She also has a little piece of an antique shawl. So all the textures I used in the book were based on that piece of antique shawl. And I incorporated the tiger’s eye into that. Then I wrote a poem that summed up our conversation together, so the work actually had text in it. I don’t do those too often. Those are really hard. That’s a branch of what the book series has led to, books on women.

CB: What does your work suggest about the relationship between people and nature?

KD: Mostly that it’s fragile. "Unending Story," is ironic because it’s being carved away. So the story is being taken away, carved away. I guess you could think of butchering our forests or anything that separates us from nature in a destructive way. But that’s anything that separates us from each other emotionally, spiritually, intellectually, or anything that separates us from ourselves. I like to think of our state — spiritually, emotionally, psychologically — as always being tied to nature. A piece like "Book Burning" is painted almost flesh-like but it still looks like a tree, and then there’s carving away at the bottom and a lot of burning. That’s about censorship and destruction, which can be connected back to all kinds of things that we might do to nature, all kind of things that we do to ourselves or to each other that are destructive. We censor who we are, the good parts of us that can move us all forward.

CB: Explain the cyclical ideas of destruction and creation in your art.

KD: That goes back to destruction and renewal. I carve and burn the pieces. I’m chipping away and destroying the piece, I put a propane torch to it and burn it. There’s something destructive in the process of actually making it and if you go a step further, the pieces are made of plywood, which is really a tree destroyed. In my process, I am building and destroying at the same time by carving away the wood even more, burning it even more. But out of that comes an art piece that you hope will communicate to someone, maybe inspire someone in any number of ways. For me the process of making them is always renewing. I understand myself, other people, something bigger than myself, maybe in a little bit better way.

CB: Why did you choose the unusual medium of encaustics?

KD: It has a pretty strong link to icon painting, which is painting on wooden panels, and sometimes those are carved, not in the way that I carve, but there is a working of the wood that is very object-like. Another link would be thinking of encaustic painting as relating very much back to nature. Encaustic painting uses bees wax plus pigment and bees wax is a naturally occurring substance. It is a material that is a hard solid when it’s cold, but when you heat it, it moves. I like that association metaphorically. How we’re this solid creature, we’re at one point in our thinking, but what does it take to ignite our imagination and what is that thing that propels us to move forward, to see things in a new light? In that sense, the material and process very much fits the content.

CB: Since your work is highly autobiographical, how have your experiences — here in Savannah, in Wisconsin and everywhere in between — lent insight to your work?

KD: That’s a good question. I have had a number of different jobs, mostly because my husband is an academic and we have tried to coordinate our jobs so we’ve made a number of moves trying to figure that out. When you move into a new situation, a new teaching environment, they are just totally different — totally different groups of students, totally different kinds of programs, totally different expectations, and different artists who are teaching there. With each move I’ve had to adapt and learn how they’re thinking and looking at art. In that sense it’s made me very broad in how I think about art and how I look at art and the ways that I’m able to teach art. When I was in Savannah what helped my skills as a teacher was we really focused on technique and approach and how to use materials, composition and design. Other places I’ve taught maybe the emphasis was more on self-expression, content, being more conceptual, maybe on being more formal and inventive and inquiring. Every place has its turn, so that effects to some degree the things that I investigate in my work. Also moving to different places and different parts of the country, you see different landscapes. That landscape really influences your palette and forms. When I moved to Savannah I though it was great because it was so green and so lush and there were so many trees around. I think that came into my work. It was much more colorful at one point. When I moved to the mid-west it got really dark. It doesn’t always hold true, but in general there’s a strong influence. One connecting thing is my interest in textural surface.

CB: Any final thoughts?

KD: I really want to thank Karen Davies for helping show my slides around and getting people interested. I thank the college for inviting me to show and inviting me to come there.