OPEN WINDOW: Field brings outside inside. |
German-born Friederike Hamann, 35, and Maine native Colin Sullivan-Stevens, 30, opened Field last summer in the exhibition space at 74 India Street. Trained in furniture design and painting at the Rhode Island School of Design, the couple complements their wallpainting business with regular showings of their continuous artistic experiments. The Phoenix sat down with them at their West End apartment to find out more.
How did field come about?
Friederike Hamann Colin and I have been working on wall paintings together since two years now and we wanted to create a venue for us to show our work on a regular basis. We use the room as an inspiration where we can distill an atmosphere in which we are relating to the environment, nature, and the change of the seasons. We can play with the room and an atmosphere in a loose and spontaneous way.
Colin Sullivan-Stevens Friederike’s been making short runs of furniture with Brian Burwell based on drawings that she does. For each one of our shows, those pieces and our wallpaintings have been loosely based on thematic correlations. The collaboration is constant in that when one of us is working on a wall painting or furniture we get advice from the other but we also have our own unique vision about what’s happening.
FH This is our sixth show now. We started with July. It was very warm and colorful with a big forest scene. All about growth and the full bloom of the season. Now we are in the dead of winter and the space couldn’t be more sparse. Very mute colors, ice and crystal themes.
It seems like you’ve created something of a feedback loop for yourself with your exhibition space. I imagine once you’re rolling, it’s hard to stop. Can you identify where the point of inspiration is in that loop?
FH The inspiration is our daily life. We go on very long walks. We share a passion for the environment in Maine.
CS We take a lot of photographs. Elements get translated from the image we’ve documented and projected onto the wall to become a painting. There’s not a direct association to the original photograph. It’s more ambient than that, more like a negative image. The painting part is where the interpretation, the hand, comes into it. They’re relatively fluid, composed of gestures inspired by the landscape.
Do they remain landscapes or distilled to an unrecognizable pattern?
CS They’re non-repetitive patterns. They’re more specific to the space on which they’re projected. Nature does take form in patterns but you don’t necessarily see them distinct from neighboring patterns. When we put the images on the wall, the mind never sees it the same way twice because it’s non-repetitive and that’s more similar to the way you experience the landscape itself.
FH I get inspired by the textures and patterns in nature. I start with a very small element I observe and then build it up to something very large. For example, a colored line, through repetition, doesn’t have to create a pattern but more of an impression.
CS (TO FH) I feel like the way you make a drawing is different from mine. You make it without a projection. More based on your imagination.
