Ticknor Society members are invited to join visual artist Sarah Hulsey on a tour of her new exhibition, Lexical Geometry at Bromfield Gallery in SoWa. Hulsey will take us through the gallery show, which features two new projects that stem from her background in linguistics, followed by a show & tell session highlighting some of her related artist's books.
Sarah Hulsey is an artist whose work explores the structure of language in a visual domain. She received a BA in linguistics from Harvard, a PhD in linguistics from MIT, and an MFA in book arts/printmaking from the University of the Arts, Philadelphia. She is a 2020 recipient of the Artist Fellowship Award from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the 2016 Walter Feldman Fellowship for Emerging Artists in New England, and the Fabric Workshop and Museum Postgraduate Apprenticeship. Her work is held in the collections of the Library of Congress, Yale University Haas Arts Library, University of California Berkeley Bancroft Library, and the Ampersand Foundation in Johannesburg, South Africa, among others.
Hulsey's first solo show at Bromfield Gallery presents two new projects that use iteration, sequence, and variation to suggest linguistic forms. The four prints in “Subject-Object-Verb/Subject-Verb-Object” were printed by Hulsey during a five-week residency in Japan focused on traditional Japanese woodblock printing. The faceted, reflected shapes in the prints were loosely inspired by the differing structures of the Japanese and English languages. “Figures of Speech” is a large, framed array of 36 prints investigating the lexicon—a complex repository of all of the words a speaker knows in their language. This project uses repeated and varying shapes, both etched and collaged, to form visual representations of classes of English words. In addition, Hulsey will have three of her artist's books to show as well, A Universal Lexicon, An Anatomical Exercise, and Asterisms. All three play with the form and visualization of language to create works that are both beautiful and edifying.
Attendance is limited to 25. Per Boston public health order, masks or face coverings will be required while inside the gallery, regardless of vaccination status.
Directions to Bromfield Gallery