Emily Belknap was selected for the 2014 Mary L.NohlFund Fellowship for Individual Artists, Emerging Artist category.
All of the fellows’ works are on display at INOVA (Institute of Visual Arts), UWM’s Peck School for the Arts’ contemporary art gallery and research center.
Belknap earned a BFA from the Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design in 2007. In 2013, she received her MFA from UW-Madison, where she earned the Chazen Prize for an Outstanding MFA Student.
Belknap began to work in the miniature scale in 2011.
“Before that I was doing a combination of sculpture and painting and went back between the two quite a bit. Then I started working at this smaller scale when I was doing stone carvings of landscapes that needed to be in a smaller scale. Eventually I abandoned to stone part of it and just worked in miniature,” Belknap.
Her Nohl exhibit features three wall installations. They represent abstracted suburban or urban landscape.
"The right hand wall is called Cedar Court and it’s a cul-de-sac with everything removed but the privacy fences that divide one back fence from the other,” she says.
The second installation is called Green Space. “These are all examples of grassy medians throughout the Milwaukee area. They’re carved out of foam and then and then are flocked, which is a velvety texture.
“So it’s as if you’re looking at the traffic medians from an aerial perspective,” Belknap says.
She experimented with a jeweler saw to create a series of four tree grates, in miniature.
“I thought for a while about sending my design off to a laser cutter, but I decided that I really need to take that time to think about these situations and to think about how important it is for me to make them, or is it important. That back and forth of doubting whether I should be making what I’m making I think is really important. I start to think about my footprint and what I’m leaving behind and that helps me to get down to what these environmental issues are all about,” Belknap says.
Belknap also includes three intricate drawings; one, a cornfield.
“What I was really drawn to is how dense it appears and how verdant it appears, and it appears very healthy. But it’s a monoculture landscape that is actually not very healthy. So this kind of back and forth between what looks healthy….what feels comfortable and what actual is a healthy, verdant ecosystem has been what I base this whole show around,” Belknap says.
She gravitated to art at a young age. “I always wanted to be an artist. When I was 5, my grandpa made me my first easel. My grandpa did a lot of woodworking,” Belknap says.
Both of her grandfather strongly influenced Belknap's life and art.
She points a drawing of two front lawns, side by side – one manicured, the other unkempt and packed with weeds. Her grandfather's inspired the piece.
“When I was really little, I was talking to him (not the easel grandpa, the other), He was talking about racking leaves and I said casually ‘oh we just leaves our leaves go, they’re pretty. We like to leave them on the ground.’ Then I had to have this long lecture about your civic duty and what it means to be a good neighbor and you rack you leaves in order to be a good neighbor,” Belknap says.
Her other grandfather belief that leaves should not be raked up was equally fervent.
“Both of these men were very engaged civically and cared about the landscape in which they lived, but had very different ways of expressing it,” Belknap adds, “I see that in other neighborhoods. Everyone cares, but the way that it manifests itself differently.”
Belknap’s environmental sensitivity includes the materials she uses. She gravitates to scrap wood and remnant bits of metal.
“As I’m making I think about what the materials mean and how the material itself influences the meaning of the work. And to me, something that definitely influences the meaning of the work is whether or not the material was purchased or found or recycled in some way,” Belknap says.
Saturday, December 5 at 2 p.m., Belknap will launch her artist book Habitats. Three of its 10 drawings are part of her Nohl exhibit. The artwork is accompanied by poetry by Sebastian Bitticks.
Belknap currently teaches at The Chicago High School for the Arts, and of course, continues to create art.
The 2014 Mary L Nohl Fund Fellowship For Visual Arts exhibit continues at INOVA until January 9, 2016.
Artist Mary L. Nohl of Fox Point, Wisconsin, died in December 2001 at the age of 87. She left a $9.6 million bequest to the Greater Milwaukee Foundation. Her fund supports local visual arts and education programs, keeping her passion for the visual arts alive in the community.
