Today we’d like to introduce you to Wendy Babcox.
Wendy, please kick things off for us by telling us about yourself and your journey so far.
I became an artist with the help and support of some of the wildly inspirational mentors, who encouraged me to pursue a life in the arts. I was born in the UK and lived in Europe for several years, working various jobs in a ski resort before I was encouraged to study art more seriously by a close family friend. I was fortunate to meet artist and mentor, Barbara Jo Revelle at the University of Colorado, who encouraged me to pursue a career in art and education. She remains an enormous influence on my practice, even now. Although I began my studies as a painter, I soon became fascinated with photography for its capacity to be in dialog with our daily lived experience. I was interested in the way that photography forms an environment we are consistently negotiating and the ways in which it helps to shape perceptions of our time. Photography is also inexorably linked to an experience of time, both as a record of a specific moment and as a residue, or trace of the past. Shortly after graduating from CU Boulder with my BFA, I joined the graduate program at the University of Florida. Once again, I studied photography, but was encouraged to pursue a more wide-ranging practice with a primary focus on conceptual concerns, rather than a singular form of making. I began to include video installation and performance and research into my studio practice. I also began to welcome projects where I worked as a member of a collective, where I am often inspired to work with others in collaboration and with a subdued sense of authorship. My work is often inspired by points of tension and conflict, by the environment and by feminist concerns.
Can you give our readers some background on your art?
My artistic practice is wide-ranging. My work is often engaged with specific tensions or conceptual questions and my approach to making is in response to those concerns. Photographs often serve as a starting place for my work. I am interested in the ways that photography acts on us, as viewers, and how photographs resonate with, and against each other. Photographs feel uniquely engaged with ideas of time and memory, but also with lived experience.
Sometimes my work is quiet and contemplative and may present itself in the form of a series of closely related images, as in the series of prints titled, “Every Olive Tree in the Garden of Gethsemane.” In 2013, I traveled to Jerusalem to photograph the olive trees and spent the next three years creating the project. The prints are delicate renderings of each tree, using a photo-etching process called photogravure, which I printed with my husband, Tim Baker. I deleted the background of each tree so that it could occupy its own quiet space in each image. The oldest trees are almost one thousand years old and embody a sense of deep time. I explore the notion that the trees are a record of the powerful tensions which have played out before them across the centuries.
Sometimes my work is more playful and outspoken. I often work with Floridian themes and with the Floridian landscape. I am interested in the human interventions we make on both a small, intimate and grand scale.
I recently worked with a series of Polaroid photographs of myself laughing wildly in close proximity to the camera. I scanned and enlarged the Polaroids to a powerful and almost disconcerting scale, and arranged them around the gallery as if they were a choir, surrounding the viewer. I titled the exhibition, “ANTHEM,” as an invocation of a rallying cry, or a song of solidarity.
I often work collaboratively, most notably with other women. I am a founding member of a collective, which runs a non-profit space called CUNSTHAUS in Tampa, where we exhibit feminist inspired projects. I also currently organize a group of women called “Noisy Women,” who meet weekly at CUNSTHAUS to learn to play the drums. I am interested in women being loud, mischievous, noisy and inappropriate. This on-going project inspired me to curate an annual night of performances by women drummers called, “SMASHBANG!”. In January, the drum performances, both collaborative and drum solos, took place in the gallery against the backdrop of my Anthem photographs. The transgressive energy of the drum performances was an appropriate match for the photographs, bringing female power and potential into sharp focus.
What responsibility, if any, do you think artists have to use their art to help alleviate problems faced by others? Has your art been affected by issues you’ve concerned about?
I think of my studio practice as a means to examine and respond to my contemporary experience. I am drawn to and examine issues of complexity and concern, which sometimes require a response with gravity and sober reflection. I also leave room for playful explorations and discoveries, which reveal themselves in the process of making. Right now, playing drums is very much a part of my studio practice. I welcome my own clumsiness and awkward and flawed performances as a fifty-five-year-old woman who earnestly wants to make some noise, rather than to sit down and be quiet! Drumming brings community with others, it brings me into my body, it’s fun, loud and playful, but it is also a personal response to national and even international events and circumstances.
I’m not convinced there is a particular and defining “role” for an artist. While much of my work is imbued with my desire to explore issues of deep concern to me, art cannot serve a particular mistress or any specific mission. Artists find their way in the studio through myriad concerns, whether they be social, political, historical, environmental, psychological. Alternatively, they may be deeply engaged with singularly formal matters such as translucency, scale, space, form, color, and texture. Each artist defines their unique role through their practice.
What’s the best way for someone to check out your work and provide support?
A selection of my work can be found on my website: wendybabcox.com
Contact Info:
- Website: www.wendybabcox.com
- Email: wbabcox@gmail.com
- Instagram: wendybadcops , noisywomxnlessons , cunsthaus
Image Credit:
Ana Perez Massard
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