Wk 12 — Artist OTW — Heather Anacker and Krista Feld
Artist: Heather Anacker and Krista Feld
Media: Woven arts, textile, woodwork, fiber
Website: http://kristafeldartist.blogspot.com/
Heather Anacker and Krista Feld are a collaborative duo of talent-strong, promising artists. Feld and Anacker showcased their incredible installations for the BFA show at California State University of Long Beach. The duos collaborative art gallery is filled with personal hand-crafted items, work tools, and versatile transportable rooms. The artists focus on the conceptualization of how important it is to understand the value and commitment it takes to create high quality stuff from scratch and by hand. In contrast to the industrial revolution, the start of creating machine processed products that lose face value.
Most of Anacker and Feld’s art pieces follow the path of neutral tones created from substances derived from nature. The artist’s grand conceptual message is that there’s many raw materials that can seem useless but have substantial potential once finding an effective way to manipulative them. For example, Krista collects saw dust from a variety of woods, after seeing the potential of the multicolored scraps she figured out a way to turn them into colored dyes. Since the artists convey the importance of appreciating handmade items, each and every piece they create is one of a kind. Their pieces have a way of feeling incredibly rich in flavor, warm, and even imperfect due to human nature. Their works can be appreciated from a distance to capture the whole essence and viewed up close to value the extreme detail put into every piece.
After analyzing Anacker and Feld’s incredible work, listening to their main ideas, and artistic mentalities, it’s impressive to see those powerful concepts come to life in their art. One of the reasons their art gallery was so successful is due to how immersive it was. The idea of taking of one’s shoes before entering the area, shows a sign of commitment and open mindedness needed to get the full experience. Showing people, the value of creating handmade items such as bowls, utensils, clothing, and furniture brings someone a greater appreciation of life. Gives one a sense of historical times were people had to create daily essentials with their bare hands rather than living through our modern-day lives of depending on factory assembly lines to manufacture an ordinary piece of clothing for us to wear.
Heather Anacker and Krista Feld’s art gallery and conceptual ideas resonated with me greatly. The overall theme of their art is captured through a historical lens which is refreshing to see in a technology run modern day world. Their handmade, carefully detailed, clothing pieces opened my eyes and spoke to me clearly. It was powerful to see how much time, effort, and imagination it takes to create clothing. Now and days that specific process gets lost in translation because machines aren’t as talented as people.
