Below is a transcript of the interview:
Bill Brooks (Executive Director, Henry Sheldon Museum): The Sheldon Museum in Middlebury is a member of the Vermont Curators group and we agreed to participate in a group themed “Technology” exhibit in 2020. We choose to highlight the Hinesburg artist Miriam Adams whose specialty is work in graphite and watercolor on paper. In an exhibit titled “Drawing on the Past,” Miriam features a variety of everyday household objects - scissors/shears, tools, time pieces, sewing equipment, yarn and knitting needles, buttons, hand fans, ladies'’ gloves, garments, and ribbons. Historically, many of these items were once technological innovations.
Miriam places these familiar objects in conversation with natural forms - flowers, feathers, fruit, leaves, and stone. Often with humor, sometimes philosophically, she depicts conversations between the natural and the man-made. As a history and art museum, the Sheldon celebrates the combination of personal stories and artistic creativity represented in her work.
Drawings of her father’s tools, of garments sewn by her mother, of a wedding fan that belonged to her husband’s grandmother are matched with more ephemeral items to suggest family relationships and insights. In addition, yarns and needles used in knitting challenge the viewer with their often double meanings. Are needles and pin cushions merely utilitarian or do they warrant deeper interpretations.
Through the juxtaposition of the natural and the man-made, Miriam creates images of striking intimacy. While seemingly simple and sparse they invite study and contemplation.
In this age of COVID-19, we have invited Miriam Adams to explore with us virtually the groupings in the museum exhibit, her personal background, influences, and artistic education and career.
Miriam, tell us about your youth and your first visit to an art museum and your later choice to study art at Barnard and how you came to specialize in graphite and watercolor on paper.
Miriam Adams: I was born in NYC, grew up in various towns in NY and NJ, and returned to the city to attend Barnard College, where I majored in art history. My first love was ballet, and the first art I fell for was by Degas. The Metropolitan Museum of Art was my favorite, both for its art and for the lovely fountain restaurant where my grandmother liked to go for tea. When I realized at 16 that I was never going to be a ballerina, it seemed natural to be a visual artist. I studied and painted with oils for a number of years, but the work became more and more graphic and minimal, and I finally totally switched to drawing. I love the intimacy of drawing, its rhythms and sinuous lines, as a means to explore movement, relationships, and emotions. And I like the simplicity and directness of working in graphite and watercolor on paper.
BB: What brought you to Vermont?
MA: I had always intended to live in NYC. But in 1971 I came to Vermont on a lark with my husband who had a one-year clerkship with the federal judge in Burlington, and we never left.
BB: You choose to open the exhibit with Birdsong, why?
MA: “Bird Song“, with its juxtaposition of man-made and natural objects, which is prevalent throughout my work, seems like an appropriate introduction to this exhibit.
BB: Let’s tour the Museum using the groupings you pre-selected: The first depicts wrenches and pliers which I believe were inspired by your father’s tools. Did your dad too have different ways of communicating? Was he hard as stone or have a big heart?
MA: My father was a chemical engineer, gentle, good with his hands, very loyal to the people he loved. He was quiet, but when he spoke everyone listened. I inherited his tools after he died. “So to Speak” could be seen to humorously contrast a flowing style of speech with a more precise manner, which was typical of my parents, each of whom had a good sense of humor. The pliers in “Choice” hold the heart stone gently and safely.
BB: The skeleton fans suggest beauty lingers – a daffodil, a blue bird’s eye – even though other parts are transitory. Does love last years following the wedding?
MA: I am drawn to the beauty of aged objects, past a perfect state, showing the effects of time and life. Celebration of decay and brokenness is more common in Asian art, as is the use of the fan shape. In western culture, fans are quintessentially associated with the female. The skeletons of fans are lovely displays of lines, so the bones have a great attraction for me. The tiny fan in “Time” was given to me by a very close friend who inherited it from her beloved great-aunt. It is now truly in tatters and does show the ravages of time. “Wedding Fan” sprouts roses, a symbol of the love we hope will survive time. “Tomorrow, I Hope” is a wish for a better, sunnier, future.
BB: The needles matched with yarn – what tales are they telling? Flowing versus tangled, piercing versus flowing?
MA: “Writing a Yarn”, “As Life Unwinds”, and “Tea Time“ are narrative in nature: recording a story, life slipping through one’s fingers, sharing life over tea. The other pieces with yarn are all different in concept. The knitting needle jabbed into the ball of yarn in “Piercing” results in a flow of “blood”, perhaps painful, curative, or both. In “Pirouette” the yarn spins around the needle like a dancer. “Looped” is simply a playful celebration of handiwork.
BB: I am particularly fond of the “House Keeping” group of two with keys dangling from ribbons with the suggestion of home comforts and security. Are they at odds or complementary?
MA: The keys and ribbons in “Housekeeping” create an enclosed safe space, the security desired in a home. “The Key” is literally a key, but figuratively a double entendre referring to the combination of the natural and the man-made in my drawings, as well as the recurring ribbons. My obsession with ribbons began with ballet but persists as a love of line and movement, shared goals of dance and drawing.
BB: The pincushion grouping – the more aged one that belonged to your grandfather is trailing sawdust and imbedded with many pins, while others suggest women’s work, but sewing is not limited by sex?
MA: The old sawdust-filled and leaking pincushion in “Hand-me-down/handiwork” belonged to my grandfather. He did all the sewing, upholstering, and repairs. Sewing is more commonly thought of as women’s work, and “Nest” recognizes that it was traditionally at the center of the home. The nest is coming apart, but still holding its center. The pincushion in “Domestic Balance” is held lovingly? precariously? In the teeth of the pinking shears; domestic life can be described as both.
BB: Cards featuring buttons and thread cards with a scissors bird alight with a piece of trailing thread. Were buttons and thread cards from your collection?
MA: The cards of buttons and threads, and the bird scissors, were given to me by friends. The Puritan pin box was irresistible to draw as a troupe l’oeil piece. I have thousands of old inherited buttons as well as many acquired over the years when I made clothes. The word “notions” used to denote dress-making items is intriguing for its alternate meaning of “ideas”, which they often inspire in my work. The DeLong card of snaps, with its heart-shaped motif and hint of “long” time, is held lovingly by gloves/hands. The idea of the scissor bird “Flying Off” with its stolen button simply made me smile.
BB: The pinking shears grouping with the serrated edges are off putting visually to me, but I believe helpful in cutting fabric. What do the chewed up letters signify and two sheers “Engaging” in conversation , confrontation, or capitulation? The tape measure is entwined in a pair of tailor’s shears – freedom or restriction?
MA: Pinking shears are useful to keep the cut edges of fabric from fraying. “Piece of Mind” is a play on the words “piece” and “peace”: chewing up the pieces of a mind along with its peace of mind. In “Engaging” the scissors can be seen as either conversing or confronting, or both, depending on one’s mood. “We tailor our myths”, with its shears and measuring tape, suggests that we shape our memories, trimming and altering, in order to make sense of our life stories, to manage and create a history we can believe.
BB: You identify your mother as a pianist, who did not like to sew, but this image is of an embroidered kimono she made for her first child – was that you or a sibling? Seen through the jacket opening is the score from Schumann’s Kinderszenen which I understand means “scenes from childhood.” Another image is of a baby kimono with a heart – unlike the stone heart held by the pliers?
MA: My mother did not sew; her only handiwork was occasional embroidery. “From My Mother” depicts a baby kimono that she embroidered for me, her only child, in combination with a bit of the score from Schumann’s “Kinderszenen”/“Scenes from Childhood”. My mother was an accomplished pianist and her love of music was another of her gifts to me. She was my piano teacher and this is one of the pieces she tried to teach me and that I still try to play. The heart stone on the breast of the old baby kimono in “Mother Love” expresses the endurance of that love.
BB: The glove grouping I suspect our mother’s and grandmother’s generations wore dress, often white, gloves and perhaps you did too during college and a few years thereafter. A suggestion here is that life slips away, perhaps depicted in the fading red rose?
MA: Gloves are intriguing for their embodiment of hands, while their folds and wrinkles retain memories of use. They can be manipulated in ways that hands cannot be and thereby express ideas and feelings. “Old Love” is just as the title says: an old pair of gloves, embroidered with roses, holding a fading rose, symbol of love. Life slips away as we hold on.