Charting the #CorrespondenceCourse of Two Artists: Abigail Doan + Brece Honeycutt
Founded on the ideas of collaboration among artists, Norte Maar is always excited to learn about independent projects that take form when two or more artists create, respond and explore the world together. One such project, initiated during the Autumn of 2015, features artists Abigail Doan (@lostinfiber) and Brece Honeycutt (@onacolonialfarm) who began a parallel process of collecting, diagramming, and altering select materials in an urban to rural dialogue intended to examine modern and historic connections in their daily lives. The results of this dialogue have evolved into #CorrespondenceCourse: a collaborative, materials exchange project between artists Abigail Doan and Brece Honeycutt.
#CorrespondenceCourse charts an artistic correspondence that features mailings back and forth between the artist's homes in the Berkshires and New York City (as well as to and from Sofia, Bulgaria, during summer of 2016) which included handmade postcards, stitched stationary, gathered materials from rural and urban walks, historic sewing patterns, hand-drawn charts, botanically dyed and pleated paper, as well as other modern ephemera. Their collaboration is continuous and ongoing.Here's a gallery of their collaborative work–their interwoven narrative harnessing the tradition of handwritten communication:
Here's a selection relevant quotes that inspired Abigail and Brece:
PROCESS + CLASSIFICATION:
“Atkins’s feather negatives, for instance –duck, parrot, peacock, emu, and so-on—indicate a classificatory tapestry begun but never finished, its threads left hanging.”
– Ocean Flowers: Impressions from Nature, ed. Carol Armstrong & Catherine de Zegher (Princeton University Press).
“Walking seems to cover time and space but in reality we are always just where we started. I walk but in reality I am hand in hand with contentment on my own doorstep.”
– Agnes Martin, by Barbara Haskell, (Whitney Museum of Art, Abrams, NY, 1992)
“Sculpture is like farming. If you just keep at it, you can get a lot done.”
– Ruth Asawa
FANS, PLEATS & FIELDS:
“The fields are black and ploughed, and they lie like a great fan before us, with their furrows gathered in some hand beyond the sky, spreading forth from that hand, opening wide apart as they come toward us, like black pleats that sparkle with thin, green spangles.”
– Ayn Rand in Anthem
“Plants are integral to reweaving the connections between land and people. A place becomes a home when it sustains you, when it feeds you in body as well as spirit. To recreate a home, the plants must also return.”
– Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants, by Robin Wall Kimmerer, p. 259
WRITING & WOMEN'S WORK:
“So long as a scrap of paper remains, I shall keep scribbling.”
– Abby May, age 24, Ballston Spa, New York (1800 June 23)
“the touch of a vanished hand,” ‘Mrs. Beeton’s Needlework Book,’ preface
*via Brece Honeycutt, WORKS, strands & threads
“… nothing but white, the air, the light; only one brown milkweed pod bobbing in the gully, smallest brown boat on the immense tide”
– one verse from February: Thinking of Flowers, by Jane Kenyon
“ … altho’ I can drive the goose quill a bit, I cannot so well manage the needle”
– Anna Green Winslow, age 12, Boston (1772 February 10)
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Current and Upcoming Exhibitions:
Abigail Doan—Friends of Fire, Tremaine Gallery, The Hotchkiss School, Lakeville, CT (10/20-12/4, 2016)
Brece Honeycutt—b(RE)ce at LABspace, Hillsdale, NY Fashion Show on 10/22 from 12pm-2pm.
Works on paper and textiles on view until 12/3—2016 Artists of the Mohawk Hudson Region, Hyde Collection, Glens Falls, NY (10/30-12/31/2016) Honeycutt will participate in the gallery talk on 11/7 at 7pm.
Artist’s websites:
