Lissa Hunter: Finding Her Truth

By Stuart Kestenbaum

Surface Design, Winter 2008

Lissa Hunter is an explorer. In her art making she goes on journeys and enters into a world where not everything is clear. But for her, the exploration isn’t a linear journey—it’s circling back to what she has always known, only with each circle her art becomes richer and more mysterious. "Home, " T.S. Eliot writes in his poem East Coker, "is where we start from," and for Lissa Hunter her first home was the conservative, stable Midwest of the 1950s. She recollects that, growing up, art was something that she didn’t know about. At the same time, she remembers feeling that she would someday understand what it was and what it meant. The seeds of the way she would work and what she would become were already planted. Her mother, Ruth Purdy, sewed and reupholstered furniture and her father, "Cordy" Purdy, built furniture and repaired cars. He was also an avocational magician. And her paternal grandmother, Hardie Oglesby, always loved things that looked "dug up."

Looking backward, it is always easier to see the patterns or paths that we have created in our own lives, and looking at Lissa Hunter’s work over time it is easy to see the traces of these most early influences: the repaired world, the elements that reveal a part of the story, and the love of materials.

She was a literature major at Indiana University for two years before changing to painting in the Fine Arts Department. She then went on to graduate school in textiles there, receiving an MFA in textile design in 1971. After graduation, she headed to Pennsylvania where she taught at Mansfield University and continued weaving tapestries. Moving to Maine in 1979, she began to look for a "marketable art" to support herself as a studio artist. She started working with both baskets and paper, but separately. She felt constrained by the surfaces of the baskets, which were determined by the structures themselves, and realized that if she were to put paper on the basket form, she could change the surface. She began creating her signature pieces at that time—the coiled raffia basket with a paper skin—along with stitched collages.

She was still searching, though, for her own artistic voice. It took her a long time, she says, to realize that "the personal aspects of someone's voice is what art is," and in dealing with her father's illness and death in 1991, her work began to change and become more personal. She was making work for a show at the Gallery on the Green in Lexington, Massachusetts, and found herself making work that was more emotional and drew on her own history. She found her work becoming more mysterious, and the planning sketches that she was making were evolving into angelic vertical figures, protective capes, and other guardian forms. Her father's death and the resulting artwork were for her the strongest emotional experience that she had ever gone through. It brought together her art and her family and made her realize that others "could see their truth in your truth and that's (as an artist) what you have to give."

The work that Lissa Hunter has made since that time reveals a distinctive voice, one that masterfully combines content and technique. While her work is informed by the traditions of basketry, she sees herself as a sculptor. In the mid-'90s, she stopped making stand-alone baskets and placed them in and on boxes. Her intent wasn't to have the boxes be pedestals, but to be integral parts of the pieces, to make a larger context for the work. She makes full-size foam core models of the boxes, which are then built in medium density fiberboard by Doug Meader, a friend and woodworker.

Her work has become more complex and layered. While she works with formal elements of line, shape, and color, she is simultaneously working with ideas. It's clearly an integrated process and for her "the process is everything." A single idea may drive the development of a whole body of work. In the series that she created for dis/appear, (Nancy Margolis Gallery, New York in 2004), she knew that she wanted to deal with the idea of disappearance. The idea of things that disappear became her lens, her filter for looking at the world. Disappearance could range from the vanishing marks of the cave paintings at Lascaux, to the lost garden tool, to the horrendous loss of life at Hiroshima.

Or, more recently, in Uncommon Things (Jane Sauer Gallery, Santa Fe, 2006) pieces evolved out of investigation of the power that objects have in our lives and culture combined with objects that "people hold dear." She wrote to friends to see what objects in their lives had that power and created work that responded to their stories. The objects—the hammer that was passed from father to son, the red shoes that were the only remnant of a two-year-old's adoption journey from Korea to the United States—speak of the power that the commonplace has in our lives.

Lissa Hunter is digging deeply and creating work that resonates on many levels. This is reflected not only in the ideas, but in the way that she is working. She is building surfaces and erasing surfaces, using acrylic paint, colored pencils, and the steady and rhythmic coiling of basket forms. She is driven by the process, the making, the idea. She can’t stop working on a piece, she says, "until it’s singing."

The layering that her work has achieved is not only the layering of technique, but the layering of ideas, and of loss and love and memory. After the line "Home is where one starts from" in East Coker, T.S. Eliot continues, "As we grow older/The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated/Of dead and living..." Lissa Hunter sees her job as an artist not just to make more objects, but to explore those things that connect us to one another and to a world that is at once familiar and mysterious.

Stuart Kestenbaum is a poet and Director of the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts. His third book of poems, Prayers and Run-on Sentences, was published in 2007 by Deerbrook Editions.