The Assemblagist

Ald­wyth on dis­play in Chapel Hill at the Ack­land Art Museum.

She does some fas­ci­nat­ing col­lages and assem­blages. Her brain seems to go to places sim­i­lar to mine as she recre­ates worlds and illus­trates ideas with bits of deitri­tus and left-​over fluh. It’s def­i­nitely not for every­one. Some peo­ple pre­fer acrylic paint­ings of land­scapes — seashores, moun­tain sun­sets, and fluffy dogs — the best are painted in one sit­ting, dur­ing a cou­ple of hours of free time. Me? My pieces take months and seem to never really be com­plete because there’s always another but­ton, or piece of cop­per, drift­wood, noo­dle or rusted fork to add. Here’s the descrip­tion of 73 year old Aldwyth:

Though an out­sider to the art world, Ald­wyth is by no means an out­sider artist. Trained at the Uni­ver­sity of South Car­olina and recip­i­ent of more than a dozen artis­tic res­i­den­cies and fel­low­ships, her work has been shown at the South Car­olina State Museum (Colum­bia, SC), the Allen Stone Gallery (New York, NY), the Huntsville Museum (Huntsville, AL), and The Halsey Insti­tute of Con­tem­po­rary Art (Charleston, SC), among many oth­ers. She uses the his­tory of art, ideas, and tech­nol­ogy as both cat­a­lyst and source mate­r­ial. Despite her geo­graphic iso­la­tion, Ald­wyth devours infor­ma­tion and images avail­able to her from libraries, book­stores, the inter­net, and art mag­a­zines. “She is a vora­cious reader and invet­er­ate col­lec­tor of detri­tus,” says Sloan. “All of the objects and images that enter her purview become fair game as the raw mate­r­ial from which her works are made.”

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