Shiela Hale
Katonah, New York
Katonah, New York
Bio: Shiela Hale studied art at Syracuse University and subsequently received a BA from Pace University and an MA in Women’s History from Sarah Lawrence College. A lifelong artist, designer, and furniture builder, Hale has exhibited extensively in the Northeast (including the Katonah Museum, Katonah NY; Silvermine Arts Center, New Canaan, CT; and ArtsWestchester, White Plains, NY), as well as in Alajärvi, Finland; and Petersham, New South Wales. She was awarded a US patent for Level-Headed Shelves, a modular bookshelf with an internal self-leveling installation system.
Statement: I am a lover of books. I read them, make them, alter them; I build with them and for them. I am comforted by their presence. I like to see them lined up on shelves and stacked in towers. I love and value them for their form as well as their content.
In 2001 I began shredding books. Anger at the routine use of language to manipulate and deceive vented itself in acts of destruction. I shredded or manipulated text in ways that appeared beautiful, but meaning was lost. Rage, spent, was replaced by acts of creation and transformation. Books became containers for bits of the beautiful earth, fragments of reality rather than representations of it. If books are containers, what kind are they? Incubators? Coffins? Safe deposit boxes?
After receiving hundreds of volumes of literary criticism that were replaced by their digital counterpart, I felt challenged to use them in ways that would preserve access to their content. I began a series of works concerned with incomprehensibly vast quantities of information endlessly produced by ever increasing numbers of people at ever increasing rates of speed, accumulating in sedimentary layers, dense beyond accessibility. Like moths or butterflies, small book-like forms emerge from between the pages and through the covers of books. Information has taken on a life of its own, escaping and taking flight. There is exuberance at the release from confinement, and fragility. There is hope and fear. How can information become knowledge? Where is wisdom?
Statement: I am a lover of books. I read them, make them, alter them; I build with them and for them. I am comforted by their presence. I like to see them lined up on shelves and stacked in towers. I love and value them for their form as well as their content.
In 2001 I began shredding books. Anger at the routine use of language to manipulate and deceive vented itself in acts of destruction. I shredded or manipulated text in ways that appeared beautiful, but meaning was lost. Rage, spent, was replaced by acts of creation and transformation. Books became containers for bits of the beautiful earth, fragments of reality rather than representations of it. If books are containers, what kind are they? Incubators? Coffins? Safe deposit boxes?
After receiving hundreds of volumes of literary criticism that were replaced by their digital counterpart, I felt challenged to use them in ways that would preserve access to their content. I began a series of works concerned with incomprehensibly vast quantities of information endlessly produced by ever increasing numbers of people at ever increasing rates of speed, accumulating in sedimentary layers, dense beyond accessibility. Like moths or butterflies, small book-like forms emerge from between the pages and through the covers of books. Information has taken on a life of its own, escaping and taking flight. There is exuberance at the release from confinement, and fragility. There is hope and fear. How can information become knowledge? Where is wisdom?