HOLYOKE — For the next week and a half, visitors to the Wistariahurst Museum and Garden can explore the body, gender and self in artwork that features sculptures, clay figures, prints, photographs and paintings, all created by women and nonbinary artists.
The show, titled “The Body / The Self,” began in March in celebration of Women’s History Month and will continue through April 11.
“I hope that the message is that you belong here no matter who you are, that your art is important, and your voice is important, especially for people who have been marginalized or left out of the discussion frequently,” said Megan Seiler, museum director at the Wistariahurst, a cultural and educational center owned and operated by the city of Holyoke.
Two black-and-white photographs at the exhibit are the work of Marina Dominguez, an artist originally from Argentina who aimed to showcase “parts of the body that are doing a lot for us,” as she put it.
“I use photography to empower women,” she said, “to make them feel comfortable and show them a different perspective of who they are.”
Dominguez founded Katunemo Art and Healing, which is a group of immigrant artists across disciplines using art to heal. This month, she is featuring a photograph of one woman each day on Katunemo’s Instagram account.
One of Dominguez’s photographs in the gallery, which she took at an art performance highlighting different stages of a woman’s life, displays a woman lovingly holding the sides of her belly.
“I wanted to show that moment of loving and self-care and self-love,” said Dominguez. “The body, it’s for us that home that is holding our souls… and that message that I got from that experience, I really wanted to expand it and share with more people.”
In another photo, a woman’s two hands meet at the flesh below the thumb and extend upward. Dominguez says she enjoys photographing hands because “they are telling the story even if we are saying something in a verbal way.”
Many of the artists found their inspiration in the natural world. For Deborra Stewart-Pettengill, this involved finding objects in nature like seed pods, shells, stones or bones and then playing with the minute elements within those found objects, without a clear direction, to ultimately tell a bigger story through sculpture.
Her two pieces of artwork on display are formed from wire mesh, a material which she says offers qualities of strength and fragility. She bent the mesh in various forms before settling on a singular form that reminded her of a ribcage. She eventually suspended four of the ribcage forms atop one another “because it felt like it was breathing,” she said.
Stewart-Pettengill’s other piece of artwork involves the same idea of stacking mesh forms, but it is less uniform with the mesh folded into six varying forms, each playing with the idea of positive and negative space.
“To me, this feels like people that work together in harmony… it feels like trying to bring together disparate thought in a community effort of sorts,” she said, adding that it eventually became a figurative piece representative of a human body.
Another sculptor, Lydia Grey, has worked with clay for over a decade as a medium to explore the body of Earth, women’s bodies, and our relationship to the Earth.
One of her sculptures, titled “Earth Mother,” is a smoke-fired contemporary teapot in the shape of a woman’s chest and face.
“It’s not clear whether this is a woman with trees on her or if this is a representation of Mother Earth with the trees growing on her,” said Grey. “It represents our intimate relationship with nature, which is often ignored in modern life, and I feel that this is really a crucial time for us to become really acquainted and close to the natural world.”
Grey says she ultimately “strives to use imagery to remind and reembody the link between the body of Earth and the human body and heart.”
The art exhibit will remain open on Mondays 10:30 a.m.-12:30 p.m. and Tuesdays 4:30-6:30 p.m. until April 11.