Curator’s Essay: Libby Wadsworth and the In Between

conversations between, 2021. Letterpress on vellum over photograph, 8 x 8 in. Courtesy the artist.

Libby Wadsworth is foremost a painter, yet her practice spans multiple media, including drawing, letterpress printing, and photography. Using the tools of art making and reading, she teases open written language with thoughtfully composed visual arrangements and a grey and earth tone palette. “We use words all the time,” says Wadsworth, “rarely perceiving them as physical, aesthetic objects.” In her studio in Eugene, Oregon, Wadsworth ponders their fluidity.

Wadsworth began letterpress printing over a decade ago. She handsets each of the metal or wooden types into the chase, or steel frame of a printing bed. This aspect of the making is deeply satisfying in its physicality, and also allows her to think through the many ways in which text and images interrelate. Hands on type, ink on metal, pressure on paper—Wadsworth notes the appeal of the dual tactility inherent to letterpress printing. In the first instance, the artist encounters the work through its creation, completely controlling the letters’ placement and printed depth on and in each sheet of paper. In the second instance, the viewer engages the surface, a haptic encounter and appreciation for the artist’s choices in making, an understanding made possible by the eyes’ reading of the physical texture of the type. Wadsworth is especially attentive to this aspect in her works’ presentation. She will often install in grids or cloudlike groupings, varying size and materials throughout, and alternating between framed or unframed works. Using movable type, one of the oldest printing methods, she embraces and upends its earliest, foundational purpose: to share written knowledge widely. Letterpress type is information in formation. Wadsworth considers this history and the labor required for letterpress printing as she makes her own works. The term “printmaking” naturally brings to mind the expectation of multiples. Yet, in Wadsworth’s printmaking, repetition’s most important role is not in the making of multiples but in the recurrence of elements that shift from one piece to the next.

Wadsworth also nods to the primary role of repetition as a pedagogical technique. She points to sentence diagrams from elementary school—the very purpose of which is to show how the grammatical parts of a language relate to a whole— as inspiration in both practical purpose and visual form. Unlike those rigid tools, however, works like grasping move beyond pre-defined rules. This example demonstrates the elegant interplay of physical materials and visual structure in Wadsworth’s art. The darkened letters of gasp anchor the softened, floating letters of ring (an effect achieved by printing four letters on Dura-Lar and four others on the sheet of paper beneath).

grasping, 2020. Letterpress on Dura-Lar and paper, 11 x 8 inches. Courtesy the artist.

InFormation, two from the larger series, 2020. Letterpress on Dura-Lar over photographs, 11 x 8 inches (each). Courtesy the artist.

Most of Wadsworth’s recent prints utilize this transparent material, a strategic choice that invites playful experimentation. What, she asks, happens in the eye and the mind when the same symbols sit on top of different backgrounds, in different arrangements? Letters operate as aesthetic objects as they float, break apart, or recede into space, pressed into the paper at different depths. In beta-bet, which Wadsworth describes as “an ongoing series of word portraits,” different textures and images shape the reception of each featured word. The works weave semantic satiation into the artviewing experience. Most people know that peculiar sensation of detachment or confusion that results from staring too long at a familiar word. Wadsworth delicately harnesses this strangeness.

A self-described list-keeper and collector of words, Wadsworth draws from commonplace sources, like newspapers, as well as academic papers that rely heavily on phrases such as “therefore” and “in conclusion.” Inspiration for her landscape elements comes from various sources, including art history textbook illustrations and her own photographs of Eugene’s natural surroundings. Although the influence of traditional still life painting and other evidence of Wadsworth’s formal study of art permeate these works, her personal interpretation of Modernism is equally present. The painted and collaged wordplay of the Cubists immediately comes to mind. In Robert Rosenblum’s essay “Picasso and the Typography of Cubism” for Picasso in Retrospect, the art historian writes of a “new-found typographical freedom” that makes possible “multiple verbal-visual reading[s],” especially of newspapers, most notably Le Journal, in the works of Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, and Juan Gris. Within Wadsworth’s body of work, the addition of imagery teases this question of letters as visual objects to an even greater degree. The InFormation prints from her larger fractures series use letters and syllables to frame different views of a broken teacup. These compositions test the brain’s power of recognition: each shuffles the building blocks of individual words—such as “in,” “or,” “on,” “mat,” “for,” “format,” and so on—playing the game of “how many parts can you find within the whole?” As letters begin to turn and flip, words are no longer words, but shapes. Whether or not Wadsworth intends viewers to look for a specific connection between each shuffle of i-n-f-o-r-m-a-t-i-o-n and its corresponding pile of shards, one naturally does. This effect is magnified by the interactions between series and individual pieces: in the exhibition, works are arranged to alternate between sizes, media, formats, and even dates. Multi-layered visual moments allow viewers to decide where to look and how to make meaning out of what they see there.

Left: instability, 2021. Letterpress on photograph, 11 x 7 inches. Courtesy the artist.

Opposite: an orange with leaves (detail), 2019. Oil on canvas, 36 x 26 inches. Courtesy the artist.

In other works, she further explores the concept of fractured ceramics, inspired by the Japanese art of mending broken pottery, kintsugi, meaning “golden joinery.” In this process, the repair is made with lacquer dusted or mixed with powdered gold, silver, or platinum. This leaves a permanent visual reminder of its repair, which reinforces the concept of beauty as the entirety of an object’s history. Cracks are celebrated rather than hidden. Wadsworth took her own approach to this concept with cups she shattered, repaired with simple Sculpey clay, and photographed: forms that became the basis of her realigning and amending series. A consideration of the unbroken cups that appear elsewhere in her works, either rearranged in photographs or painted whole on canvases, activates a natural inclination to compare and contrast. In these cases, the words and their configurations seem to take on additional significance. Each print invites a reading of the featured word as a strategy to understand the corresponding imagery, leaving the “right answer” completely up to the viewer to decide.

The painting an orange with leaves shows how Wadsworth’s combinations of text and color create frameworks for viewers’ interaction with a work. On this canvas, the titular orange is only presented as the letters O-R-A-N-G-E and the hue. The roundness of repeating “O”s, paint that streams down the surface like juice, and additional words as context clues—“an,” “with leaves”—conjure a very specific image in the mind’s eye. Wadsworth did not paint the fruit, nonetheless, the image emerges from the painting.

Left: iterations 1-4, 2021. Charcoal with wax and encaustic on paper, 15 x 22 inches (each). Courtesy the artist.

Opposite: but also, 2020. Oil on canvas, 20 x 16 inches. Courtesy the artist.

Her latest paintings galvanize words, still life objects, and natural motifs. Whereas she explores the materiality of reading and seeing in her letterpress prints, in these oil and encaustic works Wadsworth turns her attention to the tension between realism and artistic interpretation. In a recent artist’s statement she explained: “The work engages the back and forth between word and image, seeing and reading, abstraction and representation, the ephemeral and the concrete refusing the idea that these categories are fixed and mutually exclusive. The focus becomes the grey area between categories, creating an opening for acceptance and inclusion.”

Wadsworth has described her approach to painting still life elements as a play on the traditional “Old Masters” style. Using the visual cues of seventeenth-century European oil painting, dishes and fruits hold weight against a variety of unexpected backdrops. A free-floating teacup in but also is an immediate focal point. Its placement encourages the eye to travel down the canvas in the same direction as streaks of black and grey-green paint, finding the words “but also” beneath. Wadsworth’s use of shadow for these stenciled letters, juxtaposed with her flattened leaf motif above them, further disrupts the understanding of three-dimensional space.

A group of charcoal, wax, and encaustic works made this year are iterations in title and purpose. The windswept look of these stenciled letters contrasts satisfyingly with the tight edges of Wadsworth’s letterpress prints. As an “e” or “r” reverberates on the page, the effect creates a similar sensation of depth as that achieved by Wadsworth’s layering in the prints and paintings.

Throughout Always InFormation, Wadsworth locates both the tension and the beauty that exists in our present moment and the spaces “in between” our words, the thoughts they conjure, and our lived experience. Language is always at the forefront, and the question of how it infuses and animates the mind. “This or that?” “Either, or?” Must we decide? Wadsworth rejects this binary. She gives her viewers both this AND that—never an either/or. Surrounded by Wadsworth’s images, it is possible to experience the liberating space between apparent certainties.