Lesley Dill, Wilderness

Lesley Dill is an American artist working at the intersection of language and fine art in printmaking, sculpture, installation and performance, exploring the power of words to cloak and reveal the psyche. Dill transforms the emotions of the writings of Emily Dickinson, Salvador Espriu, Tom Sleigh, Franz Kafka, and Rainer Maria Rilke, among others, into works of paper, wire, horsehair, foil, bronze and music — works that awaken the viewer to the physical intimacy and power of language itself.

Lesley Dill – Wilderness: Light Sizzles Around Me features a uniquely inspired group of sculptures and two-dimensional works more than a decade in the making. It is testimony of Dill’s ongoing investigation into the significant voices and personas of America’s past. For the artist, the American voice grew from early America’s obsessions with divinity and deviltry, on fears of the wilderness out there and wilderness inside us.

The plates, in colour throughout, are supplemented with essays by Lesley Dill, Brooklyn-based writer Nancy Princenthal, Figge Art Museum’s curator Andrew Wallace, and researcher and tribal historian Juaquin Hamilton-Youngbird. The book also features a literary text by writer by Tom Sleigh and a poem by author and poet Ray Young Bear.