Mary Judge
Mary Judge
Workspace Program Resident 1999
In her Heaven and Earth Series, Mary Judge uses colored graphite powders and pigments on paper to achieve a comparable spirituality rooted in a combination of “womb symbols as structure” represented through natural elements and the concept of nirvana (the ideal condition of rest, harmony, or joy). At first glimpse, these works seem like abstract, bird’s-eye views of drawings in the sand or overexposed photographs of constellations. The artist achieved this effect, like in her earlier works, through spolvero—an ancient method of driving dry pigments through tiny perforations to transfer an image onto another surface, something not so different from the process of Buddhist sand paintings.
The symmetrical structural format and pouncing technique using dried pigments to transfer drawings onto her ceramic sculptures, helped determine her direction in paper making. Judge made mylar stencils, which she placed over her drawings, tracing the lines with silicon, which is transparent. At first, a low relief embossment resulted from the design on the stencil when it was placed face down on a newborn sheet. To achieve more surface detail and interest, she added graphite powder and various metallic pigments onto the stencil surface; some mixed with the water, some resisted, forming air bubbles and other fractal patterns on the cotton pulp. The concentric pattern evolved naturally, transforming the image through repetition
About the Artist
Mary Judge is an artist known for her complex and reductive works on paper and sculpture in cast concrete and painting in tempera acrylic. She was raised in rural New Jersey and attended Moore College of Art in Philadelphia, (BFA), Skowhegan School of Painting and Scultpure, Maine and Tyler School of Art (MFA) graduating from the Rome campus.
Her artistic development has been deeply effected by this formative experience and her frequent travels to Italy, to a summer home, where she built a deep relationship with contemporary Italian art and local artisans of the Umbria region. She worked for several years with the Grazia factory in Deruta, painting for the design market while maintaining her fine art studio practice, until the atmosphere of the factory infiltrated her art and lead to a break with traditional painting and to what she considers her mature work. Her first pivotal show in NY was in the “Selections ‘97” show at The Drawing Center where she first presented her unique “spolvero” drawings, based on a technique used to transfer drawings to another surface such as in fresco painting or in the decoration of traditional Italian ceramics.
Her works are included in the collections of The Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Fogg Art Museum, The Corcoran Gallery of Art, The British Museum and The Victoria and Albert Museum and the Museo d'Arte Contemporanea di Cassino, Italy.
She currently divides her time between Bushwick, Brooklyn, NY and St. Louis, MO, where she maintains her studio. Her relationship with Italy continues and she maintains a vacation home in the city of Nardó, a small baroque town on the Ionic sea of the Puglia region. (Source: Artist’s Website)
For more information, please visit their website: http://maryjudge.com/