Highfield Hall & Gardens Exhibition: Where Calm Hours Weave: The Hair Drawings of Leslie Schomp

The 19th-century furnished Summer Salon will be the site for contemporary artist Leslie Schomp’s installation of intimate embroideries she calls thread drawings. Her work is rooted in a tradition of using hair as a material that is humble, devotional, genetic, and of “natural” origins. Incorporating hair in the decorative arts is historically significant.

The nineteenth century saw wide-scale mourning take hold of society as important and beloved figures departed: the 1799 death of President George Washington, the 1861 death of Queen Victoria’s husband Albert, President Lincoln’s assassination in 1865, and the thousands of lives lost in the Civil War. These and other personal familial deaths unified mourning through the practice of creating mourning jewelry, plaited hair of a deceased placed inside a locket, ring or other personal item, strictly defined mourning dress communicated by color and material that one was mourning the death of a close relative, and motifs, such as urns, weeping willow trees, pastoral scenes with Mt. Vernon identified something as a mourning picture, especially popular in embroideries and silk paintings.

Leslie Schomp reconceptualizes the medium and material with images of the self and thenatural world she displays in found antique frames, creating groups to create suggested stories and feelings. The frames emphasize both equality and individuality of each image. The images explore ideas about various states of the self and the psychology of relating to the landscape and the natural world. Schomp says this work is devoted to seeing herself as part of nature instead of apart from it. Victorian hair tokens and wreaths have long fascinated her as a source of inspiration. Hair, both sensual and disgusting, becomes a medium of tension, one that also reveals that a drawing can be both an illusion and an object.

Schomp is a senior lecturer who primarily teaches drawing in the Visual Arts department at The College of the Holy Cross. She received her MFA from the Massachusetts College of Art and her BFA from Florida State University. She was a finalist for the Massachusetts Cultural Council award in Drawing in 2008. Her work was included in the recent Pyramyd publication, “De File en Aiguille”, by Charlotte Vannier, which showcased work by eighty-two international contemporary artists who use embroidery in their art.