SPOTLIGHT
body and mind
Documentation of an exhibit at the Blough-Weiss Library at Susquehanna University spring 2018
body and mind
ongoing endeavor
Much of my drawing and painting involves the daily work of making a gesture and placing that mark onto the paper or canvas, not knowing how it will be received or taken up. Right now, it is an act made amidst the myriad demands of motherhood, teaching, and living with a pain condition.
Each piece begins in the same way as a body scan, a visual map of bodily sensation. I set down a piece of buff woven paper on the wooden floor of my studio and place my hands and knees on the paper. My body hovers over the paper, guiding the marks as I draw with a chunk of graphite, sometimes with my right hand, sometimes with my left.
From the foundation of a gesture and felt sensation, possibilities open. A single mark in its infancy may be all that is needed to hold an expanse. Other drawings reflect impulses to embellish, obscure, and re-imagine as I use the eraser or smudge with my hand. The images are abstract and lyrical. They are introspective and other-facing at once, declarations of love for art-making within the constraints of everyday life.
labyrinth
2013
During a time of mine remediation at Holden Village, a Lutheran retreat center in the cascade wilderness, a traditional labyrinth had to be moved from its original location. Lori Hayes Kershner designed a new labyrinth (link to google maps) to fit into the boundaries of a former drain field. In May 2013, she worked with a group of high school students and their mentors and a maverick - driving a bucket loader and truck - to move six tons of river rocks and stone from the ball field to a former drain field.
SPOTLIGHT
leave-taking
2010
Leave-taking is an installation of 27 miniature paintings embedded in resin, enclosed in metal, and left in locations along the sidewalk where the artist often walked during her five years living in Brooklyn. The installation has a clear double meaning: not only about taking leave from a place, but also leaving objects for others to take.
See the article in the New York Post here.
413 UNIVERSITY AVE., SELINSGROVE, PA 17870
TEL: 570.863.8146
EMAIL: info@lorihayesart.com
For more information about upcoming exhibitions:
Lori received her bachelor of art and art history from Princeton University. She studied art at Massachusetts College of Art and Brandeis University and received her MFA from Burren College of Art in Ireland. Over the past twenty years, she has taught art to high school students in Massachusetts, taught art to Palestinian children in Jerusalem, assisted college art students in Massachusetts and Ireland, and served as Artist in Residence at Holden Village in Washington State.
For the last few years, Lori has taught as an adjunct in the art department at Susquehanna University. She has participated in a number of group shows, and solo projects have ranged from installing paintings in subway cars and embedding small paintings in sidewalk cracks in Brooklyn (viewable on www.lorihayesart.com) to creating daily drawings while her son naps (first posted @lorihayesart on Instagram). Her current work involves translating physical sensation to embodied mark-making.