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Patricia C. Phillips, July 2002
written for an exhibit held from September 20-November 11, 2002
Saint Peter's Church, Citicorp Building
619 Lexington Avenue at 54th Street
New York, New York
There are many ways to draw in and from landscapes. Nancy Manter is preoccupied by what we gather and glean, as well as how we revisit and reinvent spaces in our lives. Her often spontaneous, yet deeply informed studies and inscriptions of rural and urban, natural and constructed, meticulously planned or chaotically circumstantial sites explore and reveal ways to make meaning within environments. In places of her childhood, as well as more ubiquitous settings, Manter brings an attentive eye and agile mind. Balancing deliberate orchestration and fortuitous events, the work is passionately searching.
Manter's earlier work involved narrative themes and images of landscapes and domestic settings. Windows surrounded by the commonplace, yet idiosyncratic evidence of life gave view to an ambiguous outside world. This body of work was followed by a stunning series of richly colored translucent paintings that invoked the interior spaces of the human body. In the past ten years, her work has become more abstract, open-ended, and even more deeply connected to lived experience. Still influenced by landscape, natural phenomena, and the motions of the human body, there is both a fresh immediacy and poetic urgency to the work.
Paradoxically, her pursuit of abstraction has led to more direct, transparent methodologies. There is an explicit gestural dimension to the work that suggests the movement of the body in familiar and evocative spaces. The markings witness deep muscle memory that sears childhood experiences with adult consciousness. Two discreet bodies of work, using different tactics of representation, begin to connect how space accommodates both significant memories, as well as imminent experiences.
Created at the Dieu Donné Papermill, the Paper Pulp Series is an ambitious, multi-dimensional print. Referencing earlier large-scale landscape drawings "performed" in tidal flats or freshly fallen snow with feet, sticks, or skis that the artist then photographed, the paper pulp piece required an explicit, physical application. Placing nine sheets of fabric on the floor covered with a thick layer of wet paper pulp, Manter strapped on skis and glided back and forth across the pliant surface. Recalling vivid childhood memories of powdered snow incised by the skis and the shifting weight of her body, the scored and patterned paper pulp was transferred to handmade paper. The ensemble serves as a record of Manter's multiple ways of making marks. The work feels immediate, contingent, searching, and vulnerable. The scales shift in uncanny ways.
Often created at night or in surreptitious moments, the related digital prints also trace the artist's movement through emotionally complex spaces. Sandbars, snow fields, mud flats, low-lying fog on golf greens, the tracks of skid marks on a rural highway, and road washings of Lower Manhattan following 9/11. Whether making marks or diverting paths of water with her feet or sticks, Manter does not seek to describe place. Rather, she bears witness to a moment and to memory. Appropriately, Manter describes herself as a choreographer. There is a time-based, performative dimension to the work. The drawings and prints trace how movement both seeks and defines space. Manter's environmental drawings imaginatively summon spaces that are both timeless and startling fresh.