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Michelle Stuart (born 1938) is a New York based, American multidisciplinary artist known for her sculpture, painting and environmental art. Her art has created complex, multifaceted investigations of the relationship between nature and culture for over four decades and ranges in scale from monumental earthworks to intimate talismanic sculptures. In the 1970s, Stuart became known as a pioneer in the use of nontraditional materials, introducing into her art earth, seeds, plant parts, ash, fossils and archaeological shards. Her body of work is informed by her interest in archaeology, anthropology, cartography, botany, biology, exploration, literature and history. It addresses the metaphysical while remaining profoundly rooted in its own materiality. ==Work== In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Stuart’s experiments with alternative mediums led to her earth rubbings (often called “scrolls”), which were created through a process of smashing, pulverizing, rubbing and imprinting soil and rock into sheets of scroll-like paper. This important body of luminous monochromatic drawings offered the revolutionary gestures of both bringing land art into the gallery and expanding the Minimalist vocabulary to include nontraditional materials. Grounded in the particular place from whence she gathered her materials (like Sayreville, NJ, the Mesa Verde, CO, or the Honduran Mayan archaeological site of Copán), Stuart’s works explore the elements inherent to that locale and displace them in a translated artistic form within the gallery or museum context. During this time, Stuart investigated other means of addressing specific sites through her ambitious landworks or, as she terms them, “drawings in the landscape”. In ''Niagara Gorge Path Relocated'' (1975), the artist situated a 460-foot scroll of paper cascading down a large bank of the Niagara River Gorge at Art Park. For ''Stone Alignments/Solstice Cairns'' (1979), she positioned 3,400 boulders in a linear configuration which indicated the rise and fall of the sun at its summer solstice. Throughout the 70s, Stuart also proved a resonant voice in the development of the Women’s Movement. She participated in gatherings of female art professionals in New York City; in 1976 she helped found ''Heresies'', a feminist publication devoted to art, politics and history. She also helped create the Women’s Art Registry in New York, which became an important alternative, grassroots method of disseminating information about under recognized female artists. In the 1980s, Stuart shifted her focus. She embarked on a series of large gridded paintings that introduced beeswax, seashells, blossoms, leaves and sand imbedded in an encaustic surface. Their rich, thick materiality and large scale invite a prolonged contemplative exploration of nature, mirroring the work of Romantic poets, novelists and artists. Furthermore, the even surface treatment and gridded system promote a non-hierarchical world of composition; it allows perception to oscillate between consideration of the fragment and the whole. At this time, Stuart also created complex multi-media installations involving light and sound elements. For one such work, ''Ashes in Arcadia'' (1988), Stuart filled a room in the Rose Art Museum in Waltham, MA, with a monumental encaustic relief painting, as well as earth, fossils, books, rocks, plants, glass, metal, refuse, ashes and the haunting sounds of a humpback whale. A site of charred remains of a paradise lost, this work expresses Stuart’s discontent with America’s irresponsible treatment of its own natural and cultural environment. Since then, Stuart has extended her meditation on the vulnerability and endurance of nature. Her series titled ''Extinct'' (1993) was inspired by her discovery of a Victorian album of leaves lovingly preserved for posterity; it remarks on our own practices of consumption and conservation. For one work in the series, she revisited the grid formation, but this time placed a variety of fragile, dried plants within each compartment, rendering once vibrant, living elements of a garden into tragic specimens. During this time, Stuart also created the ''Seed Calendar'' drawings, which employ the grid to map the maturation stages of a seed; yet, each seed is entombed within wax, thus hinting at and illustrating growth without the possessing the liberty to fulfill it. Stuart further explored the dormancy and potential, yet unreleased growth, promised by seeds in her series of table and container sculptures, which allude to displays in natural history museums. Throughout her career, Stuart has also sought to manifest her love of literature and the writing process through a variety of strategies. In the early 70s, she began to create the Rock Book series, artworks that in their use of natural materials from specific sites might be considered alternative travel logs. These works take the form of tattered, bound journals made of earth rubbings; mysteriously, they contain no words, but rather conflate a major subject of writing—nature, and the material itself, thus enabling the viewer to “read” the landscape in an extra-semiotic manner. For example, in ''Homage to the Owl from Four Corners'' (1985), earth, owl feathers, string and beeswax are brought together to form a book. And throughout her oeuvre, elements of language recur in the form of fragments of texts, petroglyphs, postcards, logbooks and maps. Furthermore, Stuart has published numerous artists books, including ''The Fall'' (1976), a book-length prose poem about the fervor of keeping historical records. Her recent ''Butterflies and Moths'' (2006)juxtaposes Stuart’s own gouache inkblots of the winged creatures with relevant quotes from writers including Vladmir Nabokov, Federico García Lorca, Nathanial Hawthorne, Buckminster Fuller and Stuart herself. Stuart currently lives and works in New York City and Amagansett, Long Island. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Michelle Stuart」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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