EFA STUDIO PROGRAM: Member Artists
Cecil Howell
Cecil is looking at a rock, green with lichen, bulbous in form, large as a whale. It is there, but as she studies it a cacophony of earthen memories surface: the rock she played on as a child, the outcroppings where they found fossils, the boulders by the lake. They collide and recombine, a metamorphic process out of which a new rock emerges, composed of granite, memory, emotion. This is the way with place; it is always a layering of the physical and cerebral. Always part bedrock and part air.
Cecil makes work that studies this layering, digging into it and pulling up samples to examine. She makes work with curiosity; she makes work to remind myself that she’s here, that we’re here. The series presented here an archive of ephemeral moments. They are drawings of deeply ordinary objects and shadows captured in fleeting compositions. The pieces lend import to the accumulation of subtle shifts that make our days, but also speak to the fragility of our time; with a gust of wind everything changes.
Cecil looks forward to sharing this work with the community at the Elizabeth Foundation Studios and continuing to push this archive into different mediums, including printmaking. She returns to the rock. She retraces its forms. Perhaps it holds a trace of her, too. Perhaps we each hold each other on this spinning ball made from dust.
