I have a new solo exhibition opening at the Washington Pavilion Visual Arts Center, on view January 11 through May 9, 2021.
“A Garden Conversation: Prints and Drawings by Lindsay Twa”
Artist Statement
All of the prints and drawings in this exhibition were drawn directly from and inspired by my pursuits as an urban gardener. To attend to a garden is a means to guide and alter one’s immediate environment on a small—sometimes very small—personal scale. And yet within that engagement, the potential for transformation is expansive. For nearly fifteen years, I’ve been in the slow process of transforming my inner-city yard into a habitat that supports pollinators and butterflies, while also, on occasion, producing vegetables and fruit for my family. My gardening, however, is also about carving out intellectual and spiritual space. The work of the mind and the spirit goes on within the rhythm of mundane tasks that come with a garden’s care. A garden is about protecting time and space in which both seedlings and new ideas can thrive. Cicero, writing in the first century BCE, expressed this when he noted, “If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.” Alice Walker expanded this notion when she wrote “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens,” a meditation on her inheritance and racialized history as an artist and a daughter.
I make drawings in my garden, filling sketchbooks and large sheets of paper with the life cycles of my yard’s habitat. I am most excited about and fascinated by seedlings. Perhaps it is because I love new beginnings. As a teacher, I am granted several “New Year’s” every year, not just on January first. The start of each academic year, each semester, and each academic break (foremost summer) has the spirit and energy of the New Year. It is the spirit of hope and possibility. There, of course, is the metaphor of teaching as gardening: we plant ideas as seeds and see what emerges with time for our students. But there is also an actual, physical relationship: I start my garden seeds every year during spring break, knowing that the seedlings will be developing despite the crushing workload that accompanies the speeding finish of the academic year. The seedlings look ahead to my time of recovery, a time to reflect on what has been achieved and learned, gathering energy to pursue new ideas in research and creative work. They will be ready to be transplanted at the start of summer break.
Like making art, urban gardening is also a chance for fast wisdom: for learning by making mistakes, and for experiencing the challenges and heartbreaks when our hopes and ideas do not thrive. Of course, our farmers and ranchers know all about this. But for us city dwellers, wisdom can come very slowly. Printmaking offers similar opportunities for fast wisdom. The processes of intaglio, lithography, and engraving force me to tackle problems by breaking them into smaller steps. The results are always a blend of what I intended in dialogue with the uncontrollable aspects of printmaking’s techniques and materials. In this way, I open myself up to discovery through struggle.
Please visit the exhibition at the Visual Arts Center, Washington Pavilion, Sioux Falls, SD.