Vanessa Filley is a mixed media artist who lives and works in Evanston, IL. She is interested in the energetic threads that orient and connect us, ground us in place and time yet tether us to our ancestral past and future, the lines that bring us home. Her work ranges from large scale sculptural installations to tiny embroidery pieces to poems, photographs, and drawings in watercolor, pinprick and thread. Filley was voted one of Photolucida’s Top 50 in 2018 and has shown work nationally and internationally including the Sonoma County Museum of Art, Berlin Photography Week, the Lishui International Photography Festival, FOCUS PhotoLA, Stricoff Gallery, Galerie Joseph Turene, Western Michigan University, The Nashville Public Library, The Harold Washington Library, Arbor3Arts, Secrist Beach and the US Consulate General in Saudi Arabia.
Artist Statement
The eye that directs a needle in the delicate meshes of embroidery will equally well bisect a star with the spider web of the micrometer, said Marie Mitchell, the first woman astronomer in the US who came to believe that the skills of observation and repetitive practice in sewing could possibly equip a woman with the patient observational skills of an astronomer, one who could see into the vastness of space and detect pattern and understanding in the inquiry into stars, planets, moons, comets and galaxies.
Although I am not an astronomer, I am curious to explore galaxies on the page, by pricking holes in paper metaphorical stars are brought closer into view, a vastness becomes proximate. I have always loved the scientific premise that we are all stardust ever shifting and sloughing off, constantly being remade, a galaxy in miniature. This notion that matter slips off and travels along an infinite grid dispersing and cohering at varied intervals beyond anything immediately perceptible is eternally enchanting. As we are that, and every work on paper is that, the transference of energy and matter from one form into the next.
My work in thread, watercolor and colored pencil on paper attempts to explore some aspect of existence that is beyond the sense of being an individual, it reaches for something collective, synthesizing and cohering disparate parts, massing stardust. Beyond capturing a single moment, this work seek to bridge time and expand an understanding of the present.
In many ways it is the women who came before me, my artist foremothers, not necessarily by blood but those who trod indelible paths, whose footsteps wore a pattern etched now in time, who so often capture my attention. In most cases these women have been little recognized, particularly in the collections of large arts institutions and none have been valued in the way that their male counterparts have been. And so, as I have quested to develop a vocabulary of expression, a way to soothe and grapple with our national and planetary era, I have at the same time sought to be in greater relationship with these women whose creative voices cultivate a sense of meaning and home, their needles, fibers and brushes bisecting stars.
