Britt, Diane (USA),
Miriam Priestess in the
Tabernacle of Nature
ARTIST STATEMENT
Dianne Britt
Diane Britt is a rural Ohio artist whose river and woodland studio roots her work in relationship with the natural world. Using papers sourced from flax, kozo, seaweed, and algae fibers, found objects, and miscellaneous organic matter, she mines history, culture, and religion for ideas about function, control, danger, and beauty. Play and humor power her treatment of sacred forms and techniques. She works to excite and amuse herself, drawing from plant, animal, and mineral matter, Judaism and Catholicism, personal medical history, and curiosity about what lies beneath the surfaces we present to the world. Using overbeaten flax, she builds up layers and parts, adding materials to evolving forms. In her laminated paper sculpture, through long drying times, she might squeeze and tear to evoke movement and add texture and surface details. In her wearable paper ensembles, Diane crafts narratives to power her visual and material forms. Working from a place of discovery, serendipity and accidents are key as she relinquishes final control through engaging with such wildly shrinking and changing material, such ordinary and extraordinary things.
Much of what drives Diane's conceptual pieces is imagining and reimagining stories. Drawing from ancient texts, oral history, art and literature, and everyday musings, jokes, and gossip, she powers her work with the created worlds of her inventing. The 16th century golem of Prague is smuggled across Europe and its crumbs hidden in the false bottom of her bubbe’s steamer trunk from Ukraine; a century later, Diane reconstructs it with river mud and mysticism before abandoning this work, fearful of what she might unleash into the world. Miriam, ancient Israelite of the priestly family of Moses and Aaron, tires of watching her brothers commune with their god and lead their people; asking no one’s permission, she dons the sacred costume she will wear into the tabernacle to perform the rituals and make the sacrifices necessary to consecrate her congregants.
Such is life and art, she declares, and paper and its companions too in the hands of any artist— alive and celebratory and energized by creativity before their energy is subsumed back into the world for other, future use
MIRIAM PRIESTESS IN THE TABERNACLE OF NATURE
Over time, as Miriam Priestess develops and grows, the Tabernacle of Nature she has inhabited begins to inhabit her. It blossoms within and around her, with one essence embodying the other. Together, they become greater—different, morphed, evolved— than the sum of their parts.
We see now that the paper walls of the tabernacle have fallen away and gone back to the earth. Now nothing stands between her and the trees and flowers, soil and stones, animals and other organic matter living and dead. They are one being.