Rough Alchemy

Bookstein Projects is pleased to present an exhibition of sculptures by Janice Redman. This is the artist's first solo show with Bookstein Projects. Janice Redman sews, mends, wraps, glues and drills holes into everyday objects transforming them both visually and in terms of their functionality. This act of transformation has the intention of revealing, protecting and healing childhood emotions that weren't explored and certainly not talked about during the artist's childhood. Her fascination with filling, turning inside-out, and emptying bags and purses - a reoccurring theme in her practice - is "about what each of us carries around in our life - what we choose to hold close, how heavy or how light… we move through our life…" Redman "makes objects that don't have any practical purpose, but they have meaning: …I am not wanting to hide what is inside but look at it and allow it to have a voice." "My work," Redman says, "is rooted in my everyday experience and my personal history. My mother was a seamstress and a lace maker; my father restored antique clocks, working in a small shed at the bottom of the garden. The rest of my family has worked in the wool mills or steel industry, making tools. So I come from a family of 'makers,' and that is what I do: I make things. Using domestic objects I have an intimate connection to, I work intuitively and, in many cases, repetitively. The act of making becomes a personal ritual, a process of revealing that which lies beneath the surface of the everyday." Janice Redman (b. Huddersfield, England) received her BFA from Kingston University, Surrey, and her MFA from the University of Ulster in Belfast, Northern Ireland. She is a former Fellow of the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA and has been the recipient of many awards including The Hassam, Speicher, Betts and Symons Purchase Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a Massachusetts Cultural Council award in sculpture. Residency programs include Yaddo in Saratoga Springs, NY, and the Core Program at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston. Redman has exhibited widely in the United States and her work is included in the permanent collections of the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum Lincoln, MA and the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum, East Lansing, MI. The artist lives and works in Truro, MA with her family, chickens and a large vegetable garden.

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