Cynthia Atwood—Alphabet of Weapons

Common, c. 1862

 

 

David Mitchell, 2006

 

 

Susan Stewart, 2005

 

 

Cynthia Atwood, 2017

 

Cynthia Atwood—Alphabet of Weapons is the first exhibit of four in the With Eyes Open exhibition series. At its heart, With Eyes Open celebrates New England women artists and feminism. In the words of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: "We Should All Be Feminists."⁵ With Eyes Open was assembled to acknowledge a greater need for an intersectional point of view in an age of non-binary, critical gender politics and the general appreciation of feminist inquiry over the last 5 decades on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the recurrent displays of misogynist attitudes documented in the media throughout the recent presidential election. The women’s march of early 2017 was born out of such polar circumstances—a cultural rebuttal to the blatant sexism emanating from the Oval Office. We begin our series with Cynthia Atwood—Alphabet of Weapons: a body of 26 sculptures that challenges viewers to open their eyes to their unseen armory of emotional weaponry. 

 

Initiated after several years of reflection on the events of 9/11 and the palpable fear America experienced in its aftermath, Cynthia Atwood began working on Alphabet of Weapons in 2006 in order to explore myriad human emotions and how they can be tooled to work against self-care, civility, sisterhood and brotherhood. Inspired by her reflections on the individual Weapons, in 2009 Atwood began a Buddhist meditation practice, which also inspired and informed the Alphabet. ”My understanding of the Dharma and my practice of using it as a point of view for my life spurred my interest in the weapons we use against ourselves, and others, even those we love.”⁶ The 26 sculptures of Atwood’s Alphabet of Weapons raise questions that can only be answered by the viewers of this timely body of work. How do you interact with and treat others, when you are faced with emotions that tug at and direct your actions?

 

Cynthia Atwood (b. 1952 New Briton, CT) lives and works in her studio home in the Berkshires, where she has been producing art for the last 30 years. She earned her BFA in printmaking and painting at the University of Kansas (Lawrence, KS) in 1976 and her MFA in Visual Arts/Sculpture at the Vermont College of Fine Arts (Montpelier, VT) in 1999. Atwood runs a sewing business, creates art, and has taught art through programs such as the The Body Project in Great Barrington, MA—a project for women of all ages addressing body image and adornment—and as a visiting critic and artist-teacher at New Hampshire Institute of Art’s MFA program. In 1997, she was awarded a New England Foundation For The Arts Sculpture Fellowship, and in 2005 she was awarded an Alfred and Trafford Klots International Program for Artists Residency. Atwood regularly shows her work in local and regional venues here in New England, including Montserrat College of Art, Beverly, MA, and the De Cordova Museum in Lincoln, MA, and has exhibited outside the region in Arizona, California, New Mexico, New York, Ohio, Oregon, and Baghdad, Iraq.

 

Atwood describes herself as an “engineer,”⁷ “…motivated by attraction to materials and the pleasure…in handling them.”⁸Viewers are encouraged to wonder about the armatures and the combination of elements that makes up any one of the Alphabet sculptures, which are thoroughly synthesized objects retrofitted for particular associative possibilities. Each sculpture works as a stand-alone concept while also enhancing the overall ensemble. Viewers are encouraged to look for and contemplate juxtapositions and relationships between objects and explored themes. Atwood creates sculptures that fuse several traditions into single objects, often incorporating any combination of a wide variety of building techniques: drawing, painting, sewing, woodworking, metal work, subtractive construction, and the revealed or concealed use of found objects:

 

 

Atwood learned to sew when she was nine years old from her mother, “who sewed every party and prom dress, who looked at clothes I liked in stores and said, ‘I can make it better.’”¹⁰ Sewing is a prominent activity for Atwood’s studio practice. Beyond the tradition of sewing, which she embraces, sewing also enhances a potent metaphor in her work: a psychological makeup of an individual’s identity is like a tapestry or quilt or garment that we don and shed, picking it up to use again when it suits us. Atwood’s studio practice is punctuated by the inward search for clarity and sewing allows her to conjoin pieces of the interior puzzle. She embraces this “domestic” practice, “because weaving, the work of thread has always been present in domestic life. Just making a stitch relates to that legacy.”¹¹ Atwood acknowledges that “sewing is no longer ‘only’ a gendered tradition.”¹² 

 

I use “woman’s work” to represent the concepts I work with in the studio. My mother sewed, I sew; this tradition has long grown into the contemporary art studio and is now shared by both genders. “Woman’s work” began with the village women who were responsible for spinning and weaving of cloth. The church gave women one of their first opportunities to “express” their skills in public by embroidering vestments and altar cloths. For me, these domestic skills are deeply ingrained and come out of the home plot—family. I approached the Alphabet from the point of view of home and relationship, and the extended “world” family. This aspect deepened over the seven years that I worked on the Alphabet.¹³

 

 

Classifying Atwood’s work is problematic because there are no artistic traditions today that everyone practices simultaneously—as was the case in Medieval Europe, for example—and her work is an amalgam of a great many attributes and independent interests. Louise Bourgeois—an artist Cynthia Atwood greatly admires and studies—puts it this way:

 

 

Concomitantly, Atwood points out that while the term “soft sculpture” is apt to some extent for the kind of work she creates, it is ultimately not an appropriate designation for the subjects she addresses within the work:

 

 

While Atwood embraces many feminists, writers, artists and theorists, she points out that Alphabet of Weapons belongs to a humanist category: “’feminism’ is too small a category for this work, it is plural.”¹⁷

 

 

Integral to her work is a fascination with the “fantastic”; Atwood herself credits Surrealism as one of the important threads of modernism that fuels and informs her work. For Atwood, Surrealism allows for the juxtaposition of the strange with the familiar—the perfect vehicle to present abstract reflections on common emotional tools for harming others found within unusual settings and housings. But the exuberance of the forms she creates are not as much about Surrealist art per se as they are about examining the human condition with an acute interest in the relationship between invisible, interior consciousness and the visible, outward expressions of the body, including vocalizations and bodily gestures. In her general artist’s statement found on her website, Atwood notes:

 

 

Alphabet of Weapons builds off the common idiom of language and common tools of destruction, but those tools are emotional as opposed to physical. Atwood’s abecedarium is surprising and often eye opening—exposing things we may not necessarily know we do, or, worse, exposing sentiments we would otherwise try to hide. As Atwood hauntingly points out:

 

 

 

Alphabet of Weapons reminds us that violence is not only found in the obvious objects of destruction, but is often couched in the small things we do and say: Sticks and stones can break my bones and names can really hurt me.

 

 

Todd Bartel

Gallery Director, Curator

Thompson Gallery

 

 

 

______________________

1. Note: Gary Martin suggests that one of the earliest occurrences of the original phrase—“Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never break me”—appeared in The Christian Recorder of March 1862. Gary Martin, The Phrase Finder, http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/sticks-and-stones-may-break-my-bones.html,  retrieved July 24, 2017

2. David Mitchell, Black Swan Green, Random House, New York, NY, 2006, p. 223

3. Susan Stewart, The Open Studio—Essays on Art and Aesthetics, University of Chicago Press, Chicago & London, 2005, pp. 16-17

4. Cynthia Atwood, July 25, 2017 telephone conversation

5.Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, We Should All Be Feminists, Anchor Books, A Division of Random House Books, New York, NY, 2012

6. Cynthia Atwood, Alphabet of Weapons Statement, retrieved October 2, 2016 email

7. Cynthia Atwood, August 17, 2017 telephone conversation

8. Cynthia Atwood, general Artist’s Statement

9. Cynthia Atwood, Bio, http://www.cynthiaatwood.com/about-the-artist, retrieved, August 17, 2017

10. Cynthia Atwood Interview, Republic restaurant, Manchester, NH, January 14, 2017

11. Cynthia Atwood, July 25, 2017 telephone conversation

12. Atwood, July 25, 2017 telephone conversation

13. Cynthia Atwood, Alphabet of Weapons Statement, October 2, 2016 email

14. Atwood, July 26, 2017 email

15. Louise Bourgeois Interview with Donald Kuspit (1988), Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art: A Sourcebook of Artists’ Writings, Second Ed. Revised and Expanded, Ed. Kristine Stiles, University of California Press, Berkley, Los Angeles, London, 2012, p. 41

16. Atwood, August 28, 2017 email

17. Cynthia Atwood, October 2, 2016, email

18. Atwood, July 25, 2017 telephone conversation

19. Cynthia Atwood, general Artist’s Statement, http://www.cynthiaatwood.com/about-the-artist, retrieved, August 17, 2017

20. Atwood Interview, (Manchester, NH), January 14, 2017

21. Atwood, July 24, 2017 telephone conversation