Art Connect | Studio Interview
Thank you Art Connect, curators and editors, for this recent feature as one of your Artists to Watch for 2021.
A sampling of excerpts from the studio interview are below. The entire feature is findable via Art Connect’s magazine.
All images © Abigail Doan studio.
‘Abigail Doan’s environmental projects explore the visual intersections of site-specific landscape phenomena and art lab/design methodologies. The sculptural and organic forms populating her studio serve as an evolving archive of materials to be installed and documented in modifiable ways. These handcrafted and found objects undergo a process of categorization and selective recombination as a means to examine material life cycles, adaptability, and resilience. Abigail’s use of fiber, recycled plastics, soil/clay, and textile/tool components serve as a counterpoint to her photographic recordings of environmental stimuli and ideas about loss and preservation.’
‘The artist considers a walk, or any type of site-specific interaction, as a means of archiving; presented as collections of carefully sculpted and polished found objects. Abigail Doan’s project Walking Libraries reveals still and sterile arrangements through which we get to read into a dynamic and natural process of documentation. By contemplating the texture of a landscape and the specific elements of that particular space, the artist rebuilds a narrative that explores one’s cooperation and confrontation with nature. ’— curator, Radu Sticlea.
‘Abigail Doan’s interdisciplinary perspective is of great importance for the contemporary world. The questioning of the entire human apparatus [historical and technical], as well as the attempt to establish a relationship with the natural world, appear with special urgency on the horizon of our collective future. Doan’s work can be conceived as a general archive of the Earth, where the artist’s body does not fail to intervene subjectively and to originate new possibilities with determined intensity. In this live, poetic, and sensitive archive, the work of phuysis and the work of the artist complement each other to define plans for the ethical sustainability of the human with the planet. The work alerts us to the need to create new future ecologies where the relationships between the two do not find hierarchies of domination and control.’ — curator, David Revés.
