Lillian Blades
By Sonia Farmer
When you come across a piece of art by Lyford Cay Foundation scholar Lillian Blades, you don't just look over the work, you engage in a rich emotional exchange.
Lillian's assemblages — large sculptures made up of any combination of picture frames, fabric from clothing, magazine images, buttons and found or sought-after objects — present complex landscapes of texture and colour. This visual language weaves personal narratives that speak to universal subjects of fragmentation, memory, loss, and family.
"It's a visual version of emotional experiences," she says. "There are bits and pieces of so many things that I like and that I pull from. They're like fragments. I try to break everything down into its most common denominator and then put it together in a way that makes sense."
Lillian has established herself as a Bahamian artist; exhibiting solo shows at the Central Bank and The College of the Bahamas. Her work has also been featured in group shows at the National Art Gallery of The Bahamas and in the pivotal Funky Nassau – Recovering an Identity exhibition that traveled to Wiesbaden, Germany in 2006.
In addition, she has made a name for herself abroad. Her pieces have appeared in group and solo exhibitions in several U.S. states, Trinidad and South Africa, and are included in international permanent collections. On the occasion of her upcoming show at the highly regarded Hammonds House Museum in Atlanta, Georgia — Eye Sea Reflections, running November 22, 2009 – January 31, 2010 — we take the opportunity to revisit the accomplishments of one of our exceptionally talented scholars.
After graduating from Saint Augustine's College in 1991, Lillian attended The College of The Bahamas, where she received an Associate's degree in Art. She then headed off to Georgia to study for a BFA in Textiles and Painting at Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD).
While a Foundation scholarship helped lift some of the financial weight off her shoulders, Lillian still had to work virtually non-stop during her summer breaks in order to raise sufficient funds to complete her degree. Every year, with the assistance of noted Bahamian artists Brent Malone and Antonius Roberts, she would present an auction of her works.
"Brent and Antonius would be the auctioneers, and it was fun," she remembers. "I'd have my friends dress up like Vanna White and bring the art out. Antonius was just always so lively and he knows everyone, so he'd be calling all the names of people holding the paddles."
Roberts remembers well Lillian's perseverance, as well as the strong sense of community that characterized these events.
"Lillian is a tenacious go-getter and really prolific and she was never short on work, so some of the auctions included as many as 60 pieces," he recalls. "You had people around like Vincent D'Aguilar and Dawn Davies and lots of other big art collectors who really made it their mission to support up-and-coming artists. The one thing I enjoyed most about the auctions was the fact that there were individuals willing to support by way of purchasing her pieces."
After graduating from SCAD, Lillian went on to earn an MFA from Georgia State University, and she has since taken residencies at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine and The Caversham Center for Artists and Writers in South Africa.
When she first embarked on her studies, Lillian planned to focus on textiles, with the aim of one day creating a textile company in The Bahamas. However, finding the business side of textiles limiting, she started to concentrate on painting, though she never entirely left behind her attraction to fabrics and frequently incorporated them into her work. With an increasing awareness of 'craft' or objects made by African or African diaspora cultures for spiritual and functional reasons, she has chosen to pay homage to and build upon this ancestral tradition in her assemblages.
Lillian once described her work as "the visual equivalent of jazz." The eye, like the ear in an impromptu jazz session, becomes captured again and again at every new turn. Indeed, while her finished works are powerful, the awe for the observer really lies in uncovering the history of each piece; the way Lillian has chosen to construct — carefully, playfully, seriously — her story.
"The effort in putting these things together for me, the process, is very important," she explains. "You can see that when you look at my work. What you're seeing is a portrait of the process. The richer it is, the better."
The beautiful resulting objects seem to be a form of sculptural quilting, and indeed this practice is close to her heart. The social history of quilt making, such as quilting bees, where women would get together and share their fabrics and stories, connects the act of piecing fabric together to the act of conserving community narratives. It is no surprise that when Lillian embarks on community installations, she draws upon the quilt form.
Take, for example, the AIDS Awareness Junkanoo Quilt Project, completed in 2006. With support from the U.S. Embassy and The AIDS Foundation, Lillian inspired 200 kids, ages 6–14, across several Bahamian islands to create swatches for a community quilt. The kids responded visually to a South African story about a boy who finds out his friend has AIDS, and the social implications that follow. The result was a massive, semi-sculptural mesh of voices coming together to raise awareness about HIV/AIDS.
By living and working in Atlanta, Lillian has had an opportunity to connect her art to African-American and West African experiences and histories. Indeed, her methods of creation draw from several geographical and social spaces, and her work is not easy to pin down. In spite of this, however, it remains easily accessible to observers from all walks of life.
"She really speaks about universal ideas. Even though she is a Bahamian woman artist rooted in this place, the work itself just takes on a whole different dimension," says Erica James, Director of The National Art Gallery of The Bahamas, where she has selected Lillian's work for group exhibitions. "All of her subjects and themes have a human element to them, and in that respect can resonate to a very broad group of people no matter where they're from, really."
Among the recurring themes in Lillian's work are those of motherhood and childbirth, and how they relate to passages of time. Disconnected from her mother at the moment of her birth and now a mother of a nine-year-old girl, Lillian's assemblages oftentimes represent a battle between separation and bonds. Her pieces tenuously reach forwards and backwards at once, trying to find a foundation on which to stand and yet always moving ahead.
"Because I didn't even know my mom and her side of the family, I lost a lot of understanding about myself," Lillian explains. "I'm not mourning it, I just find it interesting. Right now I'm dissecting all these clothes and I feel like I'm going back in time because my mom was a seamstress. I feel like I'm doing the same thing, like I'm looking back by dissecting clothes and putting them back together in a quilt, but it's almost like I'm making visual medicine for my own comfort. It makes sense to me."
For her show at the Hammonds House Museum, Lillian explored another theme in her work, blurring the line between the observer and the observed.
"I wanted to have a human element in there. I wanted you to feel like you were being observed, so I added eyes, images of eyes from many people. I cut them out of magazines," she says. "And then there are mirrors where you see yourself as well from different angles. It's hard to focus. You're fragmented, you see your eyes repeated in several places as well, so you become a part of the piece."
In her current work, Lillian has returned to the personal narrative. As a tribute to her father, who is a plumber, she is experimenting with different sizes of PVC pipe pieces, incorporating them into her assemblages. She is also revisiting past works, claiming she is only finished "when I cannot add or take anything away."
Artists who are familiar with her work know that she will always be true to herself, no matter the theme.
"If there's one thing you can say about Lillian, it's Lillian is about Lillian — whatever it takes to move Lillian, she will follow it, and that has always been her focus, and she will live or die by that," says Antonius Roberts. "That's what makes her work broad in its appeal. It's like music: when it becomes honest, it becomes universal."
For more about Lillian and her artwork, please visit www.lillianblades.com.
Sonia Farmer received a scholarship from Lyford Cay Foundation, Inc. in 2005 and graduated with a BFA in Writing from Pratt Institute in May 2009.
Photos # 1 – 4: A selection of works from Lillian's 2008 Eye Connect series.
Photo #5: Quilted Passage, Lillian's installation at the Atlanta Hartsfield-Jackson International airport.
