Anne Elliott Installations and Mesh Work

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gallery 4 - installations and mesh work

For years Elliott explored mountain regions in this country and in Kenya, Pakistan and India. She loved trekking through the Himalayas, especially the arduous climb to the base camp of K2, the world’s second highest peak. Her experiences of the mountains forced her to abandon conventional means of depicting landscape.

Interviewed by Robin Stahl for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette in January 1984, the artist said, “The experience of total wilderness, of being where the creation of the Earth is still visibly in progress, affected my life in terms of spiritual values and

psychological insights. It so transformed my work that I found two-dimensional forms no longer adequate to convey my intense feelings for the mountains…K2 turned me into a sculptor.”

Elliott constructed her reliefs and installations using a medium of her own invention. She painted sheets of rice paper to suggest rock surfaces, sewing some together to make ribbons of paper up to 36 feet long. She reinforced the paper with cheesecloth and matte varnish, rendering it stiff but flexible. With this material, Elliott composed on walls in relief or, using a ceiling grid for support, in space. Hilton Kramer, former art critic for the New York Times said in his review, “…the surprise of the work comes from the success with which a medium so light weight and malleable captures the feeling of a theme so weighty and awesome and earthbound.”

Elliott returned to large-scale work for her 2009 exhibit at the Silva Gallery in Pennington, New Jersey.

Gallery 4: Click the thumbnail photo on the left to view the enlarged photo on the right.