Tiffany Bociek’s solo exhibition, Enduring Exuberance, is composed of 3 series that have been born from the artist’s inside exploration of her previous, her current point out of currently being, and a vision for her potential self. This is the very first in a series of exhibitions in 2024 at the gallery that will discover the curatorial concept of “Memories”. Produced by encaustic painting, the physical layering of the wax attracts a pretty parallel to memories that are handed down from one technology to the upcoming as each individual is extra to the collective family narrative. Under Bociek points out her course of action of working with encaustic and how its imperfect mother nature has impacted and changed her perfectionist mentality.
Sparks: Can you explain what encaustic portray is and how you do it?
Bociek: Encaustic is primarily the layering of incredibly hot wax. Encaustic means to “fuse” or “burn in”, so each layer receives fused jointly. I use a torch and heat gun, and often even the sunshine to develop my operate.
I commence with a porous substrate this sort of as wood. I will usually mark up the painting 1st, so it’s not blank, and then I’ll go around it with about 3 or 4 layers of very clear wax. From there you can do a lot of distinctive things. For me this is wherever I get started to function much more intuitively. I’ll have my coloration variety laid out and start creating marks and burn in just about every layer. And it is a truly wonderful system simply because you have so much that you can do with it.
A person of the matters I’ve been savoring lately is making a deeply layered history and then taking a knife and scraping into it to expose some of the layers beneath. It is wax, so as you’re developing up, some layers are heading to be taller or bigger up, and some are likely to be deeper down. So as you scrape, you can permit areas of the major keep on being while in other locations scrape down to expose the layers beneath.
I also like to carve into the function, which is named incising. You can carve into the wax, lay yet another coloration in, and then scrape that color back again. You can have seriously good line specifics functioning by way of it. You can do even image transfers it’s a actually entertaining process with the wax because it’s never ever best. When you do image transfer, it normally does not finish up completely sleek on the wax—sometimes the photograph doesn’t fully adhere. It’s about the course of action, and for me producing the encaustic is about coming to the being familiar with that achieving perfection is not the ultimate target. For me it is an emotional expression.
Sparks: What is the genuine approach of applying sizzling wax like?
Bociek: The sizzling wax is used to paint with as an alternative of a conventional paint like oil or acrylic. It has to be wax produced of purified beeswax, and tar resin, which is a natural resin that will come from a tree. Fundamentally you pound the resin down and set it into a heated pot and insert the beeswax in to conclude up with this new wax. You can insert pigment to it and mix that in to develop diverse colored waxes. Then you heat up the brush (which has outdated wax hardened in it currently) in a pan. The difficult detail is that the two the substrate and brush have to be at certain temperatures, since a temperature variation involving brush and substrate can build dissimilarities in textures (which you may possibly or may well not want). It is a entertaining procedure.
And relating to storing these, the melting temperature of the wax is about 180 to 210 levels, so unless of course your encaustic artwork is in your entrance window and the sun is beaming at it, which you shouldn’t do in the 1st location, it will be okay.
Sparks: What is the topic of the exhibition?
Bociek: To me Enduring Exuberance is a playful way of pondering about lifestyle. A lot of my do the job is centered close to the notion of daydreams or memory. So some of the pieces are reflections on stories that I grew up with.
My mother was a genealogist, and on our spouse and children holidays we would vacation throughout the country searching at cemeteries and discovering the stories of my relatives. And I would understand and recall people tales as if they have been my individual recollections. I don’t forget sitting down and listening to my Nana and Pops talk about their childhood, their mom and dad and grandparents, and realizing those people tales as if I could tell them myself. And so a lot of my perform is based mostly off a kind of inward self reflection and feeling that relationship with relatives.
There is a recognizable feeling of nostalgia, I imagine, in specific parts. My “Wandererers” series facilities close to this notion of questioning who I am, and how I received listed here. When the sequence started out, I started with issues that I had in my head about how I obtained to this place. And then I built characters and put them into specific minimal conditions to support go by way of that. And then as experiences improved, my responses transformed, or my dilemma type of adjusted. I begun hunting additional inward, and found myself through time spent in the yard. Listening to all the appears all around me, it’s astounding how quite a few sounds that we have in this hustle and bustle of life that can go unnoticed, these types of as how the appears of the flapping of a bumblebee differ from that of a honeybee’s. I get all those recollections of the garden and translate them into my function as a way of dealing with a changeover that I was going by way of.
I also made a “tear and share” collection, which was in essence about breaking my own temperament, which is pretty perfectionistic. And that actually, definitely compelled me mainly because that challenge was about developing a one piece and then tearing it apart. You have to use a sizzling knife to minimize as a result of the wax, and you don’t generally know specifically the place points are heading to be part of jointly. So when you tear it all aside, parts of wood get trapped to the erroneous side and you have to slice it apart. But because it is wax, it is actually enjoyment. You can use the warmth in your palms to rejoin it back with each other, or use the warmth gun, either way you have added a new mark to the present piece. I acquired to truly participate in with these components and just investigate and have enjoyment.