Amoeba

Quarantine has led me to work beyond my medium, to explore what art making really is to me, what place-making looks like, and my gratitude for the home and the colors that surround me. My hands are busy, constantly moving the yarn through my fingers creating something with the lost and forgotten balls of yarn. Just enough yarn that you cannot bring yourself to get rid of it but not quite enough to make anything whole. This is not the first time my world has been turned upside down nor will it be the last, I am sure, this time, once again I turn to yarn. The crochet hook creates something whole out of fragments. I distract myself from my thoughts with the colors that bring me joy, as I sit with myself. 

Amoeba is the stretching, searching nature of our thoughts, and needs as we wait in our homes. Shelter in place has caused almost all art making to become domestic. This piece emphasizes the domestic sphere as a place of making, challenging the notions of what art is. For me color is place making, my childhood home has always been vibrant with colors, Amoeba draws from these colors spreading outwards consuming our exteriors as we are focused into interiors.

With the closure of public spaces, the public realm becomes private and the private public. With the return of stoop culture the threads of community are increasingly being woven together from a physical distance. From my porch, I watch my neighborhood support each other through greetings yelled across the street, stopping to talk to someone in their yard, and messages of support made with brightly colored sidewalk chalk or painted on rocks. What once happened behind closed doors as gatherings of friends and neighbors has spilled out into the street ‘private’ gatherings consuming what was once public space.

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Color has increasingly become the focus of my work. We use color to enhance our world, giving ourselves context and contrast. How we perceive, label and understand color fascinates me. When I say red, everyone thinks of a different shade but we all agree that it is red. 

I have often been wary of using color in my work, worried it will look childish; that I will not be taken seriously as an artist. In Chromophobia, David Batchelor explains Western culture’s fear of color. How the West has systematically devalued and marginalized color, making it feminine, primitive, juvenile, vulgar, and queer. The recognition of my own socialization means I can start to unlearn these ideas and embrace my love of color. 

These reflections allow me to deepen my use of color without self-judgment. My work is rooted in sensation, tactile exploration, patterns, and color association. Color enchants me and provokes a deep emotional response. Form is less important than how color sits on the page, how colors interact with one another, and how they change with light. I am interested in creating, changing, and altering space. My work is full of gestures that come with bold colors, abstract forms, and positive and negative space. I am drawn to joy, human experience, interconnectedness, capturing moments of existence and interiority

Take a look at more of my work www.charlotte-holt.com