Paintings in this handmade book are “stills” inspired by African cinema.
Helen Hawley is a difficult artist to pigeonhole. Her work includes sculpture, painting, artists’ books, weaving, prints, performance and video. “I don’t have favorites. I can’t even say that I go through phases, but I have been working more with drawing recently,” says Hawley.
Hawley was featured in the 2016 Wisconsin Triennial (her multi-media installation included a rain barrel with sound and video projection). You may remember her from the farewell takeover of the old incarnation of the Madison Municipal building in December 2016, where Hawley and Marina Kelly’s “Subterranean Garden” incorporated video, fragrance, ambient forest recordings and swan decoys.
Hawley’s latest show, A Song to Cross a Big Stream (Jan. 7-Feb. 16 at the Arts + Literature Laboratory) draws heavily on her recent month-long artist’s residency in Saint-Louis, Senegal. Hawley spent November at Waaw (pronounced “wow,” it means “yes” in Wolof, the main language in Senegal), an artist-centered cultural exchange. Her job was to create a foreigner-friendly map of Saint-Louis. The map focused on the city’s tourist center, an island separated from the mainland by the Senegal River and protected from the Atlantic by the barrier peninsula, which is home to many of the area’s fishermen. The new map includes art galleries, nightclubs and hotels, marketplaces — and, significantly, street names.
“Sundown” examines the ephemeral nature of sunset.
“I lived on the mainland, about a 25-minute walk over the long Pont Faidherbe bridge over the Senegal River,” says Hawley. The island is home to much French Colonial architecture — “some crumbling, but some also restored,” she says.
Everything in Saint-Louis took longer compared to the pace of life in the U.S. “People kept telling me, ‘do small, do small,’” she says. When a big wave topped a seawall and drenched her cell phone, she took it in to see if it could be repaired, and was “reprimanded for losing hope.”
During Hawley’s stay, the area experienced flooding and extensive coastal erosion — “water was flooding the streets,” says Hawley, and entire rows of houses were inundated.
Works in A Song to Cross a Big Stream incorporate varied aspects of her month in Senegal. A fabric chair called “You Are Welcome Here, Sit Down” was made with the help of a tailor in Saint-Louis. Hawley is also working with colorful Senegalese plastic mats called nattes “to bring in color and warmth.” Several window-sized installations will be specific to the ALL space.
Handbound books of drawings and paintings depict scenes not only from Senegalese life but from the many African films Hawley discovered at Waaw’s cinema night: “I’m someone who goes to film fests, but there is a whole continent of people making films scarcely anyone in the U.S. ever sees.”
Hawley, a graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design, holds a master of fine arts degree from UW-Madison. She’s originally from Missouri, where she was “born in a tent” — literally — as her parents (“yes, hippies,” she laughs) had bought land, but not yet built a house or even sunk a well. “I’m concerned with things natural and artificial,” says Hawley, “and blending old and new materials in a thoughtful and deliberate way.”
Adbou Diakhate
Hawley on the beach near Saint-Louis.
One piece, “Sundown,” a plastic sack she interwove with orange silk, is “a container for something that is uncontainable, but we can’t help to try to hold,” she says.
Hawley speaks with a thoughtfulness that indicates she takes nothing for granted. “Each piece has a little bit of internal logic. I don’t even want to say that [each piece is] true to itself. And I hope that when they are all in the room together, they start to speak.”
A Song to Cross a Big Stream is part of Hawley being named a 2018-2019 “Bridge Work Madison Artist,” an emerging artist program started by ALL. The opening reception is Jan. 26 from 6-9 p.m.
