This is the animating premise of Transformations: dialogues in art and material which opens this Saturday, May 9th at browngrotta arts. The exhibition that asks a deceptively simple question: what happens when artists stop treating materials as additives and start treating them as collaborators? The answer, it turns out, is profound.

Material Is Not Neutral
We tend to think of materials as passive — the stuff through which ideas pass on their way to becoming art. The artists in Transformations challenge that assumption at every turn. In the contemporary art context, materiality isn’t just about physical substance. It encompasses everything a material carries with it: weight, surface, history, cultural memory, expressive charge. A piece of linen isn’t just woven thread. It’s centuries of labor, landscape, and touch.

System and Surprise
Transformations proves that the range of works that a simple material can inspire is nearly endless. Carol Shaw-Sutton, Chiyoko Tanaka, Sara Brennan, Mary Giles, Merja Keskinen, and Jane Sauer all work with Linen. In Shaw-Sutton’s hands the material becomes a molded vessel. Under Chiyoko Tanaka’s ministrations, woven linen fabric is returned to its essential threads, transformed into an artifact. For Sara Brennan, woven linen serves as a canvas. From a distance, her works appear to be abstract paintings. A close up view reveals a textured weaving using dozens of shades. For Jane Sauer and Mary Giles, linen is a sculptural medium.

Material as More
Metal is a canopied category in Transformations. Artists consider it as thread— from gold filaments, to lead extrusions, to bent wire of copper and brass. Kyoko Kumai’s spun steel threads float. Gyöngy Laky turns nails and wire into an artful assemblage. Sue Lawty weaves with bast fibers — raffia, hemp, nettle, linen — and elemental lead, and assembles carefully ordered stones drawn from beaches and riverbeds. She pursues qualities inherently given by the chosen substance, seeking “an understated restraint, balance, tension, rhythm: an essential stillness.”

Same Input, Different Outcome
Toshiko Takaezu and Yasuhisa Kohyama both devoted their lives to clay, but their practices reveal just how vast the distance can be within a single medium. Takaezu’s closed ceramic forms — rounded, glazed, often containing a small stone or rattle sealed inside — are intimate and quietly mysterious, their surfaces richly colored and their shapes suggesting the human body. There is a sense of the maker’s hand coaxing something from the earth. Kohyama, by contrast, surrenders control to the fire itself. He builds by hand and fires with wood, never applying glaze; color and surface are entirely the product of ash movement and the object’s position within the kiln. Where Takaezu brings clay close — shaping it into vessels that hold secrets — Kohyama sends it into an elemental process and receives back something ancient and unpredictable.

What These Works Carry
What unites the artists in Transformations isn’t a shared aesthetic or a shared geography. It’s a shared conviction: that choosing a material is a serious act, that working with it is as meaningful as the finished object, and that what results carries something more than form.

It carries thought. History. Culture. The trace of a hand that knew exactly what it was doing — and trusted the material to meet it halfway.

Join us at Transformations: dialogues in art and material (May 9-17) at browngrotta arts in Wilton, CT. Or order the 164-page catalog from browngrotta.com.

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This year’s Spring “Art in the Barn” exhibition at browngrotta arts is Transformations: dialogues in art and material. In Transformations, we’ll highlight the unique materials adopted by artists we represent, including lead, stones, feathers, seaweed, and coconut fiber. We’ll also explore the singular results achieved by different artists approaching the same material.

One of the those materials is linen — we’ll exhibit “quivers” by Gary Trentham, figures by Mary Giles, vessels by Carol Shaw-Sutton, and wall works by Chiyoko Tanaka, Sara Brennan, and new to browngrotta audiences, Merja Keskinen.

Merja Keskinen is a Finnish artist whose explorations of color and linen intrigued us. She is an illusionist, creating single surfaces that appear dimensional like that in Rhthym of Colors which gives the impression of a three-dimensional work. Her method provides additional surprises.”The texture and structure of the surface imitate woven fabric,” she says, “but I make the works without looms by braiding and sewing. I wind my yarn around frames of different sizes. Usually, the warp thread continues unbroken in the direction of the weft. I weave parts with a simple plait binding, threads of different colors cross each other vertically and horizontally, one over, one under.”

Keskinen’s explorations of color are equally mesmerizing. “I combine colors and threads according to a preselected system. The impressions and changes created by the colors are based on mathematical considerations and systematics. In parts of the works, the thread colors change a few threads at a time according to the chosen system.”

The colors blend optically; subtle shifts and delicate changes are optimized. In Horizontal Colors 1 and 2,  the starting point for each work is three colors — blue, red and yellow, and three different shades of the colors —  nine thin linen threads each. The combinations of three colors created different shades of brown. The combinations of two colors created different shades of violet, orange and green. The works consist of all 81 different color combinations according to Keskinen’s predefined system. Rhthym of Colors consists of 184 differently colored parts.

For viewers, the experience of Keskinen’s work is multifaceted. The different colored threads can be distinguished when viewed closely, when viewed from a distance, the color is formed by the combined effect of the shades. The third element that impacts the viewer’s experience is spatial. “The delicate works made of transparent, light structures take their final shape only when hung in the space…, “ Keskinen explains. “The colors live according to the space. The same work in different spaces can appear as different color experiences. Light plays an important role in shaping the works.”

The artist, who graduated with a Master of Arts degree from the University of Art and Design (now Aalto University) in 1988, lives and works in Helsinki. Keskinen’s career initially focused on industrial textile design and expert positions on textile collections for public spaces, eventually becoming a full-time visual artist. She has held several solo exhibitions and participated in group exhibitions with her works at home and abroad. Her commissioned work for the Finnish Embassy in Paris was completed in 2012 and for the Finnish Pensions Agency in Helsinki in 2020. The Textile Artists Association TEXO awarded Keskinen with the Textile Artist of the Year award in 2019. The Arts Promotion Centre has granted Merja Keskinen a 5-year state artist professorship grant for 2022–26.

The artists in Transformation: dialogues in art and materials, including Merja Keskinen, all meet curator and historian Glenn Adamson’s definition of material intelligence, that is: “a deep understanding of the material world around us, an ability to read that material environment, and the know-how required to give it new form.” We hope you’ll come and see her work this May.

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