Chaco Range, graphite on vellum dipped in beeswax, 68 x 168″; all photos courtesy of Afton Love
Driving across the New Mexico wilderness, you may just spot someone standing atop a ladder leaned up against a large rock formation. You might think, “I wonder what that geologist is investigating?” or “Oh, I wonder if she is looking at fossils?” But, as you get closer, you discover you have actually stumbled across the visual artist Afton Love delving deep into life’s mysteries.
Love is now based in northern New Mexico, but spent her childhood in Butte Creek, California, where she soaked up questions that the deep canyon walls and crevices surrounding her presented: How did they form? How have they changed? What have they seen across their expansive lifetimes?
Photo courtesy of Afton Love
Love became invested in translating such mysteries into artwork and was accepted into the California College of the Arts with a series of abstract oil paintings that explored light as a transcendent secret. While in attendance, however, she grew “frustrated at [her] attempts to illustrate mystery,” and started making tiny, translucent and abstract watercolors that “almost weren’t there.”
Working through different materials to aid her investigation, she stumbled on a technique combining graphite-covered tracing paper and wax. Love dipped graphite rubbings of her studio floor into melted wax and became enamored with the saturated, luminous papers that resulted.
Then, as Love was driving up Butte Creek Canyon with the light hitting the rock walls just so, she realized she needed to paint the giant rock formations that had been filling her vision since childhood. She used powdered graphite and custom-made paintbrushes to cover rectangular pieces of tracing paper with drawings of rocks, which she then assembled into a large grid after dipping them in wax.
But it was not until she attended a residency at the Santa Fe Art Institute and stumbled upon the geological formation Plaza Blanca near Abiquiu that Love made her first large-format rock painting—a piece that spread across seventeen feet of wax-dipped pages. (Of note, Georgia O’Keefe saw that same formation from her Abiquiu window and painted it several times herself.)
Plaza Blanca, graphite on vellum dipped in beeswax, 51 x 154″
By the time Love returned to New Mexico to attend the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation residency and then the Roswell Artist in Residence Program, she had already cataloged a set of rocks that she wanted to revisit for her artistic practice.
Two rocks in particular—which Love would name “Through Rock” and “Split Rock”—caught her attention: Through Rock with its large hole smack in its middle and Split Rock with a large crevice opening at the top and running down its length.
Love captured both of these formations in her unique powdered-graphite wax-grid technique and became fascinated with the ruptures in these formations. She says she “really labored over” these rifts, asking herself, “How do I draw what’s not there?” Like the impenetrable black shadows in her drawings of larger formations, Love started to associate these moments in her paintings with pursuing the transcendent.
Through Rock, graphite on vellum dipped in beeswax, 68 x 56″
Split Rock, graphite on vellum dipped in beeswax, 85 x 70″
She tried other ways to capture what she couldn’t see, from making a large physical cast of the hole in Through Rock to capturing imprints of the holes’ walls with clay slabs that she fired into foot-long square, hanging tiles. These are cast in a number of materials, including a technique she developed with members of the Taos Pueblo to transform local, micaceous clay into a black, paper-mache-like substance that she then used to create both more square tiles and a series of bowls.
Photo courtesy of Afton Love
Embedded Pair (graphite), cast resin and graphite, 12 x 12″ each
Looking across her body of work, Love says that there is a comfort in the unknown, because “we are all in it, and consciousness is being able to be aware of what we don’t know.” The unknown, though, also pushes up against our desire to know and our pursuit of a meaningful life.
Standing in front of the rifts in Love’s drawings of Split Rock and Through Rock, the viewer is immediately confronted by several questions stemming from the works’ intentional ambiguity: “Are these vulnerable moments about to collapse or does their formation have a settled strength? How big am I in relation to these rocks?” By thrusting the viewer into a relationship with these rocks, Love instantly places the audience into a dialogue with everything else in the world as well. The rocks are much older than the viewer, but exist in the same contemporary moment and are both big and small, both strong and vulnerable. In that instant, geologic time and a human life are equalized and, as Love says, “there is the possibility to acknowledge and acquire relief from existential fears: ‘I will die, and so will that rock—the scales may be different, but the end is the same.’”
Installation at 5. Gallery, photo courtesy of Afton Love
In generating that moment of self-awareness, Love’s work opens up the possibility of self-examination. “We cannot know the fullness of the rock, but we can strive to know ourselves better and to live a meaningful life,” says Love. “By considering that there are things we do not and will never know, we grasp how small we are, and upon pushing into that idea we realize that we are vast as well.” People are just as complicated as the rocks, and are additionally self-reflexive and their time more immediate: through Love’s work they’re led towards a cathartic self-reflection about the meaningfulness of each of their own moments.
Her attempts to portray the holes in these rock formations by pushing clay into the holes’ edges furthers this examination. She uses local, micaceous clay to take these imprints from the rocks and holes, and she then fires them with wool to create a paper-mache-like substance. Love is able to transform the resulting material into durable, dense bowls that are also thin and delicate. In these pieces, it isn’t geologic forces over time that create spaces and ruptures, it is human hands—traditionally, with the express intention of filling then emptying them of food or water. In Love’s pieces, however, these bowls become vessels not for our sustenance, but vehicles to hold ourselves and our existential questions. They become a personal, intimate expression of not knowing that is quite comforting indeed.
Sixteen Faces & Sixteen Bowls, pit-fired micaceous clay, variable dimensions; photo courtesy of Afton Love
Afton Love’s show Perfect Union is on view at 516 Arts in Albuquerque, New Mexico, through May 22, 2021. Her work can be seen online at aftonlove.com.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR: CORWIN LEVI
Corwin is a visual artist working in design, illustration, bookmaking, curating, and writing. As an artist, he has attended over twenty artist residencies. He has also have lived in eighteen cities across twelve states. Along with Michelle Aldredge, he co-created Mirror Mirrored: An Artists’ Edition of 25 Grimms’ Tales. He is currently remixing vintage game boards and making a book from illustrations of Alice in Wonderland.
Marvellous work – thank you for this intro to the world of Afton Love.
Thanks for writing, Sigrun. We’re glad you enjoyed Afton’s beautiful work!
I saw a few of her large scale drawings at the Harwood Museum in Taos, NM. Magnificent!!! Thanks for this feature!
We are so glad to hear that you got to see the pieces in person! They are so special when experienced physically… wish we could have seen that show. Thank you for commenting.