Lynn Sures
Ileret Footprints, 1.5 mya (triptych)

Media: Colored pencil on artist-made pigmented kenaf paper
Size: 16" x 73" x 0"
$700

Artist Statement:
Isolation in the abstract is a sensation I have known in a different context, whenever thinking about what people must have been like over the tremendous passage of time. It seems to me that overall, contemporary people are strangely isolated from the people who have preceded us—sometimes decades, hundreds, and particularly thousands of years in the past. What would it have been like to be...more tangibly connected to those who came before us? Without real familiarity, I search out information about ancestors where I can; from talking with my own family, to reading about historical figures and cultural movements, to learning about art history and anthropology. In this way I can feel that we are a part of a continuum, not unique, not alone. Especially now, with the perception of living through a singular period of crisis, it means something to acknowledge that this pandemic is one of countless that have afflicted humanity through time. I am looking at points of convergence between our early ancestors, their societies, their ecology, and our own human identity. For papermaking, I usually pulp natural fibers that have been known to, and used by, artisans and makers over a great expanse of time and place. For my pictorial subject matter, I might draw excavation sites with evidence of early human presence. It is best sitting onsite while I work, to know the feel of a place; in the long days of drawing, I think about sounds and movements made there by earlier people. To be able to internalize kinship, I touch, handle, and draw fossils of Homo erectus, the first tool makers. I start with the same tactile connection when drawing fossils and artifacts left by the first artists who used ochre pigment—Neanderthals and archaic Homo sapiens. So I naturally draw them as once alive, and still communicating—ancient habitats with their palpable traces; and the ancestors of us humans. In this way, I try to speak to human presence, community, equality, all reaching across time.

Biography

Lynn Sures is a Maryland-based artist and a recent Smithsonian Artist Research Fellow; and currently a Research Associate at SI National Museum of Natural History, in drawing. Her 2019 exhibitions include “Topographies of Life: Rogers, Sures, Watkin” at the American University Museum, DC; and “Pulparazzi: Painting with Paper” in Jamestown, RI. Sures is President of North American Hand Papermakers; and founding Director of the Collegiate Handmade Paper Triennial, and of the Fabriano Paper/Print/Book summer study program. She was guest editor of the 2016 Winter issue of Hand Papermaking magazine, on the papermaking of Italy. In 2019 Sures was in residence at the Museo della Carta e della Filigrana in Fabriano, Italy with Tom Leech, collaborating on their artist book project to be published by the Press at the Palace of the Governors, Santa Fe, NM. She is Professor Emerita of Corcoran College of Art and Design, DC (now GWU.)

http://www.lynnsures.com/