This Saturday, June 18th, Noel Anderson’s one woman show will open at Magpie in the Overland Sheepskin Complex here in Taos.
Originally from Columbus, Ohio, Noel has lived n Taos for 27 years. She married young to a local, very talented musician, lived through her husband’s early and untimely death, endured single-motherhood and continued making extraordinary art through all of it. No easy feat!
Noel started out working with leather, making hand cut, stamped and dyed jewelry and accessories.
I remember visiting her during the early 90’s, and she was already creating small installations and assemblages out of rocks and stones; crystals, bits of metal, bones and found objects were collected together on tabletops like alien altars. Even then, I took note of the way she had arranged these disparate things so they appeared unified and related somehow, despite their different origins.
In 1999 she began creating cohesive, miniature assemblages and eventually started incorporating vintage books, frames, found and natural objects into these otherworldly creations.
“Her stitch-work, stamping, composition and overall aesthetic is impeccable,” says Georgia Gersh, fellow artist and the owner of Magpie. “A curious mix of Victorian, Steam Punk and Eastern (art).”
“One of my inspirations to open Magpie was the fact that Noel’s work is under-represented and relatively undiscovered, I am hoping that this showing of an incredibly substantial collection will get her the exposure she deserves.”
This is Anderson’s first solo exhibit at Magpie and she has created a new body of work, consisting of three-dimensional pieces, challenging herself to work on a larger scale then she normally does.
“Generally, when I host a solo show for an artist in the gallery annex, I do the curating and hanging,” Georgia explains, “but with Noel’s show I gave her a week and free rein to set up a magical environment.”
“When I visited her studio last summer, I was so taken with how everything was displayed; from her collection of blue glass bottles and figurines, the folded pages of vintage books soon to become mobiles, to the finished work on the walls, I felt like a child finding myself in a page of a beautifully illustrated fairy tale.”
No doubt Anderson will create that same sense of wonder and curiosity with this exhibit.
Saturday June 18th from 5-7pm at Magpie
For more information visit Magpie’s link below this post.
All images of Noel’s work c/o Magpie
