Hilary Brace
Drawings
Hilary Brace’s imagery is composed and rendered from her imagination. Her drawings are not premeditated, but emerge from an explorative process of suggestion and discovery. Working in powdered charcoal on the smooth surface of matte polyester, Brace applies tone to the image area, and then removes it to create lighter values, slowly bringing the image into focus.
These inventive views, often animated by wildly Baroque weather events, seem psychic in nature, almost primordial. The drawings are both intimate and sublime, with their near photographic veracity bringing them fantastically to the edge of believability. The artist invites us to surrender to the unique logic, power and beauty of these other worlds, while reminding us to reconsider the familiarity of our own.
Awards for Brace's work include a Guggenheim Fellowship, National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Drawing, two Grants from the Pollock Krasner Foundation and a California Arts Council Fellowship.
Tapestries
Brace's tapestries begin with detailed digital drawings created from the artist's imagination specifically for the weavings. Working with the TextielLab at the TextielMuseum in Tilburg, Netherlands, the drawings are translated into unusually fine Jacquard weavings. Through the artist's unique combination of very fine threads, some of which are metallic, translucent or reflective, the pieces change in response to the light source or position of the viewer. In varied lighting, the pieces may move from misty and atmospheric to seeming dimensional, giving the weavings a tangible quality of light and space.
