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PATTERNS WORKS BY KATHERINE KADISH AND JACKIE BARTLEY February 19 to March 23, 2001 You are cordially invited to a reception on Friday, February 23 from 5pm to 7pm. There will be a poetry reading by Jackie Bartley on Thursday, March 1 at 7pm in the De Pree Gallery. Ut Pictura Poesis: "As Poetry So Goes Painting" This notion was a critical concept in the 15th and 18th centuries. Unlike the Renaissance view which gave poetry primacy, in this exhibition we find an equivalency between these two arts in their expressive possibilities. Both genres in this case treat a manifestation of domestic life. One of these artists asserts societal influence as formative. The other realizes "shapes in their purest form," a product of the generative role of the body. This exhibition challenges us to consider such similarities and differences that we might fully experience the liberal arts and interdisciplinary possibilities here at Hope College. John M. Wilson Gallery Director

Katherine Kadish
Swimmer, 2000, Mixed Media, 40" x l0"
Photography: Jon Warner Funding provided by the Women's Week Committee,
Photographic consulting: Steve Nelson the Cultural Affairs Committee, the Visiting Writers Series
Design: Eron Powers, D. J. Blake and the Encounter with the Arts program.

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Threading the Bobbin

Part of a collaborative exhibit with visual artist Katherine Kadish

I first learned of Katherine Kadish's work from a poet friend who had read several of my "sewing poems" and suggested I send them to Katherine who was working on a series called "Patterns." Since the poems and paintings had already taken shape when we shared them, this exhibit is not a collaboration in the traditional sense. We did not dialogue or play off one another's ideas as jazz performers do, but we did respond to common cultural experiences that, as women coming of age in America in the fifties and sixties, our psyches had absorbed.

It is these early cultural experiences in all our lives that seem to me to be a kind of apprenticeship. We learn who we are, the boundaries we are expected to respect, and the shape our lives might take, from the adults with whom we spend our early years. In my case, that adult was my mother. My perceptions of the world and how I was to act in it were shaped by how she acted. Certainly, her words were important too, but there is much more to communication, to language, than simply words.

I spent a good deal of time watching my mother sew. Later, I learned to sew myself, but, by then, my attitudes about sewing as well as about my life had already been patterned by hers. In our culture, sewing has been perceived as women's domain. That is one of the pieces in identity's garment that young girls have accepted in the past. It is one of many pieces-fashion's dictates, our desire to conform, our need to be considered attractive, the right height, the right weight-in a myriad of external pressures that establish boundaries for the ways we act, dress and think about ourselves.

Both boys and girls in public school these days are instructed in what we used to call home ec and shop, but I'm not convinced that token change in the curriculum has greatly changed the pattern of behavior we learn when we are young, while our sense of who we are and who we might become is still under construction. Women viewing this exhibit will still likely identify with the images and words while men may view them secondhand. Yet, we all go through the apprenticeship of childhood, and we all eventually have to acknowledge and, most likely, question the forces that have made us who we are. These poems and paintings document and rhapsodize how patterns shape our lives.

Jackie Bartley
February 2001

Galleries Contact: Jackie (bartley@hope.edu) or Katherine (kkadish123@aol.com) for information about hosting this exhibit.

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