Additional Artists G-Z & Exhibitions'11: Ilene Sunshine

I make three-dimensional drawings and works on paper using cast-off materials— dead Christmas trees, plastic bags, and other detritus scavenged from the urban landscape. My process gives me a chance to participate in staged acts of transformation, to consider the blurred boundary between nature and culture, to have a dialogue with a leaf.

Eclectic sources come into play: garden design and pruning techniques (from bonsai to espalier), vernacular craft traditions, Dr. Seuss, the long and varied history of art from both formal and theoretical angles. But all of that aside, my work happens by manipulating materials. In our digital age, I remain committed to a visceral engagement with things, always on the lookout for surprises that defy rational description.

When I'm asked to explain my work, Emily Dickinson's words come to mind: "If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry".

About The New Vein Series

The New Vein series is an extensive body of work comprised of dried, gessoed leaves and plastic bag fragments hand-stitched to paper.  This on-going project (since 2005, currently a folio of 85 images) is a 21st century riff on the herbarium— a collection of preserved plant specimens used for study and analysis.  But I've corrupted the botanist's craft by seamlessly merging highlighted aspects of a leaf's structure with the ubiquitous graphic designs found on plastic bags.  My renderings are a nod to the increasingly blurred distinction between natural and man-made, as well as a meditation on commerce's ever-presence.  But that is not to suggest that the motifs are vehicles for dogma; each one is an engaging puzzle that I invent and solve simultaneously. They take shape mysteriously as I look closely at the leaf's design to discern how it might be married to the hundreds of graphics I've snipped from bags. This wonder hovers in the back of my mind: thousands of years ago plastic (derived from petroleum or fossil fuel) was most probably algae. My sewing is a way of mending— not repairing holes, but making 'wholes' from disparate parts. 

Ilene Sunshine graduated from Boston University’s School of Fine Arts, BFA Sculpture, with honors.  She is a recipient of several awards and fellowships, including the Dieu Donné Workspace Program and the New York Foundation for the Arts, NYFA Fellowship, 2011. She has been highlighted in The New York Times as well as The Boston Globe. Sunshine has also exhibited extensively throughout the United States, at such venues as Kentler International Drawing Space, Red Hook (Brooklyn), NY; Islip Art Museum, East Islip, NY and The Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro, NC. Her work has been purchased by many private collectors as well as by public collections including the Victoria & Albert Museum, London, UK; Meditech, Atlanta, GA and Fidelity Investments, Boston, MA.