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Batik Art and Barrier Islands
North Carolina-born artist Mary Edna Fraser has often flown the southeast U.S. coast aboard her grandfather's antique single-engined Ercoupe airplane, now piloted by her father and brother. At college she "fell in love" with batik, a resist-dye process for printing on woven cloth for which some parts of Java island are famous. During the 1990s Fraser became familiar with the work of the coastal geologist Orrin Pilkey Jr., of Duke University, and came to share his distaste for jetties, groins, sea walls and other structures that interfere with the natural movement of sand along the shore.
In recent years Fraser has tied these disparate strands together to create a highly original art form. From the plane she photographs the coast's natural beauty, often searching long and hard for frames that conceal its disfigurement. Sometimes supplementing these images with watercolor sketches made on the ground, she then transforms them into batiks, using both classical and modern methods.
In 1994-95 Fraser first teamed with Pilkey to produce an exhibition of her work that appeared at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. Currently on exhibit at the Duke University Museum of Art is another set of Fraser batiks, along with Pilkey's wall text panels and writings about barrier islands and damaged shorelines by South Carolina poet Marjory Wentworth. A Celebration of Barrier Islands: Restless Ribbons of Sand will remain on view at Duke until March 21. On March 21 the exhibition reopens at the National Science Foundation in Arlington, Virginia, and will remain there through mid-June.
"I'd like for my work to speak on behalf of the land," says Fraser. "If it increases ecological awareness, that's fine by me." |
