Creating a Sense of Place
A five-month fellowship in Japan informed conceptual artist and faculty member Jane Lackey’s work—and how she teaches.
By Jennifer Eberbach
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| Faculty member Jane Lackey |
January 2012—“Traveling ancient pilgrimage routes to temples and shrines allowed me to move through those spaces, to walk along intentional pathways,” says conceptual artist and faculty member Jane Lackey, who was awarded a JUSFC/NEA Creative Artist Exchange Fellowship in 2011. Immediately following these regular walks, she would return to her small apartment in Kyoto, Japan, and begin to draw.
“Some of the routes are called circuits, which was particularly interesting to me because I envision circuits in my own art,” she says. Lackey’s art uses a visual language to communicate its message. The images evoke circuitry, expressing concepts that include genetics and neurobiology, systems of communication or transportation, and human movement.
When she sat down at the table in Kyoto to draw, she did not try to document exactly what she’d seen. “I used my experiences as a resource for making art that relates to my feeling of moving through those spaces themselves,” Lackey explains.
While in Japan, she also visited contemporary art sites and a number of Japanese paper production studios. Visiting these places became her own self-designed pilgrimage as a contemporary artist who uses paper as one of her primary materials.
The trip continues to influence her work in Santa Fe, especially her classroom. “I want to funnel my experiences in a conceptual way into my drawing courses at Santa Fe University of Art and Design,” she says.
Lackey comes to the university after a long career as an artist and faculty member—17 years at Kansas City Art Institute in Missouri were followed by a decade in Michigan as an artist in residence and the head of the Fiber Department at Cranbrook Academy of Art. Her overarching desire has always been to share her expertise with students while simultaneously focusing on her professional art career.
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| Lackey created the site-specific installation chalk talk, shown here in detail, using chalk, paint, nylon cord, wax, rubber bands, and screw eyes at the Art Gym in 2010. Photo credit: Brian Faulkes. |
To that end, Lackey brings a sensibility for site specificity to her art and her classroom. This fall, her drawing class used the campus as a muse by creating scale models of different “slices” of the school’s architecture. “A lot of ideas have sprung from it,” she says. “Not only is scale modeling practical for students to learn, it offered us a chance to explore the beautiful spaces at the university.”
Lackey is no stranger to onsite collaboration. Before traveling to Japan, she exhibited the installation chalk talk at The Art Gym at Marylhurst University near Portland, Ore., where she presented her audience with a similar invitation to scribble messages and drawings on the wall with pieces of chalk dangling from the ceiling.
Lackey’s next pieces include interactive installations. “I want to invite people into a pathway, allowing them to participate in the artwork through writing or other methods,” she says. The interaction and collaboration she sees both in her own art and in her classes at Santa Fe University is essential. Her message to students and others is broader. “You have to be dedicated to a path of discipline, observation, and experimentation to create innovative work that is connected to our time and place,” she says.
