Lesley Dill: Wilderness: Words Are Where What I Catch Is Me

Lesley Dill, Omnipotence Enough (Emily Dickinson), 2017, oil stick on fabric. Courtesy of Mattatuck Museum.

This summer, the Mattatuck Museum is hosting renowned multi-media artist Lesley Dill’s newest exhibition, which is comprised of a group of towering figure sculptures, many more than eight feet tall. Elongated and theatrical, these hang, costume-like, just above their shoes. Text in a variety of unevenly-sized fonts—a characteristic Dill motif—is painted or sewn across the forms, which also contain surprising details such as horsehair stitching and ruffles cut to look like oak leaves. Smaller works—including scrolls and dolls—line the walls. The exhibition premiered at the Nohra Haime Gallery in New York City last February.

The sculptures depict specific historical and fictional literary figures from early New England. They include Hester Prynne, protagonist in Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter; Sojourner Truth, abolitionist and former slave; and Emily Dickinson, the poet who has been a favorite subject of Dill’s for years. All were radical creative thinkers whose rich inner lives mirrored the wild freedom of the early American landscape even while social rules often constrained them. By transcribing associated texts on top of the sculptures, Dill reminds us that it is due to the enduring, revelatory power of the writings that they left that we are able to experience these insights ourselves. Nearby wall labels translate the drawn writings into legible text.  

In a 2014 Brooklyn Rail piece, Dill writes about the influence of a childhood vision on her work. Childhood is again evoked in the Mattatuck installation, where, as curator Cynthia Roznoy says, one “weaves around” the “enchanting and provocative” oversized figures and writing hovers between legibility and playful shape. The power of Dill’s remarkable subjects seems connected to their ability to retain a visionary capacity—often associated with the openness of childhood—into adulthood. Roznoy says: “[The Dill show is] very approachable. And yet. . . there is something else.” By giving viewers a new, primarily visual pathway through which to learn from these literary figures, Dill’s show is both homage to and an expansion on the power of the inspired imagination, as both a central part of America’s history and, hopefully, its yet uncharted future.