Art on Display: “Silent Forms”
Art on Display: “Silent Forms”
Ellicottville Native Tami Fuller Exhibits at Project 308 Gallery
NORTH TONAWANDA - The Project 308 Gallery located at 308 Oliver Street will host a solo exhibition titled “Silent Forms” featuring multi-media artwork created by Tami Fuller. Fuller, a native of Ellicottville, is the owner of Bluebird Studio in East Aurora, where she creates work and facilitates workshops to educate the public on the arts - specifically fiber arts - with hands-on learning experiences.
“I am delighted to welcome Tami to the gallery with this exciting and prolific showing of her works,” says gallery owner Natalie Brown.
The public is welcome to view “Silent Forms” at the opening reception on Friday, January 13 from 6:00-9:00pm. “Silent Forms” will be on view through March 1, 2023. The gallery is open every Wednesday from 3:00-7:00pm or by appointment (call 716-523-0068). It is free to attend the opening reception and gallery hours.
Silent Forms: “How does one embrace the darkness as the pathway towards light without getting lost along the way? The melding of darkness and light into shadow forms draws one further and further like a spider into a web and you lose track of where fingertips end and the other self begins. Moving farther and farther deliberately into shadow and shedding skin over and over discovers new layers and new reflections, weaving together new shapes while pulling apart the old so they can be reformed and redeemed.”
Using fiber, wood, steel and thread, Tami Fuller pulls the darkness up to embrace it and balance it with the light, finding grace somewhere in the middle. She's called up by the undeniable spirit of survivorship to explore past self and create and play with tactile forms until the darkest of secrets are exposed and the abstract finds form.
Her silent forms pulse, demanding your presence and attention, the product of a lifetime contemplating the unexplainable and exploring the lines between right and wrong, loud and quiet and overt and covert - joy and pain - and the secrets and stories we tell ourselves in between along the way.
They stand tall, slouch with sadness, rear back in pride, tell stories and hold space. Her forms tenderly block the light, letting us know that we can value our shadows as much as the light we're often told is what we should strive for. “But like most things, the truth lies somewhere in the middle. It's only through thoughtful contemplation of our darkness that we become comfortable enough to expose our light.”
More about the Artist: Tami Fuller is a fiber artist based out of East Aurora, working as an abstract weaver and felt artist. Born and raised on a family sheep farm in Ellicottville, and connected to the fiber community in a professional capacity, using traditional women’s work as a medium to explore these concepts was a natural choice. She is self-taught and works in the abstract using woven tapestry, soft sculpture, mixed media and metals.
Her work is driven by first-person experiences with exploitation, and she uses fiber in non-traditional methods to explore feelings of entrapment and suspended states. Embedding foreign objects and protrusions within her early work began as her way of expressing the struggle to find healthy expression for damage. She began by deliberately interjecting chaotic elements and foreign objects into linear weaving as an exercise in letting go of conforming to external standards, and her work is informed by her own understanding of self through the process of self-exploration. Her work mimics a sense of escape and overflow.
Fuller’s work blends the fluidity and softness of wool with sharp lines and metal. The contrasting elements create work that is thought provoking, visceral, and at once stark and delicate. Her work represents personal growth and shadow work exploring trauma and self-exploration. Her forms are an invitation to contemplate how the unraveling of one’s identity during crisis mirrors the disintegration from straight lines into abstract and the illusory unraveling is not a fall to ruin as it appears, but rather can be a path to personal freedom and empowerment. She uses intuitive and deliberately unorthodox weaving methods as a way to uncover latent imagery hiding in the personal subconscious, unrecognizable to the ego. She is especially fascinated with how free form weaving and abstract felt sculpture allow those images to rise naturally as an end product of a successful self-actualization and integration process.
For updates and more information about the exhibition and the Project 308 Gallery, find “Project 308 Gallery” on Facebook and @project308gallery on Instagram.