Mary Lambolay
Lead Art Teacher at Principia School in St. Louis, Missouri
BIO
Mary Lamboley is a teaching artist who has lived and worked throughout the US and abroad, including in Italy and South Africa. She earned a BFA in Painting from the University of Kansas, and an MFA from the School of Arts and Consciousness at John F. Kennedy University in Berkeley, California. She studied abroad at the Florence Art Institute and has attended workshops and residencies in Tuscany and South Africa led by teaching artists rosenclaire. Since her show, Overlapping Territories, at &Ampersand International Arts in San Francisco, she has exhibited nationally and internationally and won awards, including the Robert Motherwell Foundation Dedalus Award, for a full fellowship to the Vermont Studio Center, and an Artist Support Grant from the Regional Arts Commission. Since 2014, Lamboley has worked to increase her capacity to integrate anti-racism, social justice, belonging, and mattering into her teaching artist practice. She currently teaches Art at Principia School in St. Louis.
Abstract
An Unsettling Process
The umwelt theory that the mind and the world are inseparable resonates for its implications on the individual, society, and ecology. Connecting mind and body, it relates a being’s reality and senses, and as such, displaces the human (and the hierarchy therein) from a centralized position or standard of measure for all experience to a horizontal, participatory one including all beings. This post-humanist approach recognizes how vast and diverse reality is, as it brings texture to thought, expands through and beyond the limits of language, and reconnects the individual to the whole and to nature. Within the context of the Anthropocene and from the position of my various identities, especially as a white, American cis-woman and mother, I research how culture shapes me, and how the larger systems operate through me. I dedicate my teaching artist practice to influencing these dynamics to increase awareness, bear witness to both suffering and joy, and participate in meaning making and mutual liberation.
In my recent series, Convocations, I respond to the turbulence of the pandemic, climate change, and global, socio-political unrest via the threshold of my extended prosthetic digital senses, with their algorithmic flow of scrolling frames and endless zoom tiles. I attempt to find an unfiltered place by provisionally drawing with line on paper. I reference 19th c. salons to suggest and unsettle a fixed, rational order. Initial gestural impressions stack, overflow. In line with surrealist technique, decalcomania, formulated first by A. Cozens in the 1700’s, I follow shifting threads to what presents itself now, as if listening more than talking. Bridging past and present, the process acknowledges the role of recognition on perception, and makes way for invention. To resist the weaponizing of ambiguity, each drawing suggests and disrupts its own logic, and the opportunity to imagine new possibilities, sensitize heart-mind, and expand the limits of a collective umwelt becomes always imminent.
Keywords: Umwelt, Post-Humanism, Process, Ambiguity, Drawing, Decalcomania