Ivy Hale

Artist Statement:

Through the creation of my portfolio, I have realized that all of my work has something to do with the idea of a path or the notion of seeking, which I’ve found often overlap. As a freshman in high school, I spent a lot of time wandering the woods across the road. It wasn’t long before I started coming across game trails– paths trod on by animals enough times that they become visible features. I took great comfort in following these trails, though I’ve yet to come across the animal who created them. 

As an artist, I believe that in order to move forward, one must first understand that which precedes them. The game trails that comforted me were the products of generations following the same path. I applied that idea to my own family history, and found myself thinking about my grandmother, Linda. She, too, was an artist, and several before her shared that path. There is a strange sense of security to be found in knowing that someone before you has been where you are.

For a long time, I depicted things as they were. I once found surety in this place of control but as of late, it’s become stifling. In response, I’ve been trying to create more intuitively; I’m leaning into my interests and seeing where they take me, trying to be unconcerned with the absolute. My process is to explore and discover my way into the work. 

I’m captivated by the power we have to change the story of a given thing or place, and I explore this with my materials. In the snails’ sandbox component of my piece, A Study of Desire, the audience was provided with a number of origami snails in a large, fine-grain sandbox with a prompt to consider their choices as they moved the snail through the smooth sand. I was interested in how many chose to change the narrative of the other snail’s path relative to those who kept to themselves and forged their own trail. 

As I look back on all the work I’ve done, one thing becomes clear: it all builds on itself. Years ago, I found a trombone, neglected and tarnished in a storage closet. I was tasked with drawing it some 18 times, and each time I found something new I hadn’t noticed before. When I sought to capture the essence of the trombone, I threw myself into the research. I was so infatuated with it that I began taking trombone lessons that summer.

In short, I’ve come to recognize that each piece I create can easily be traced to the one before it, going as far back as the 18 still lifes. Some of these pieces are my proudest works, and some of them are pieces I at first thought nothing of, but have since learned their importance to my ultimate message that everything– the past, the present, and everything in between– is connected.