Loren Schwerd
bio
Loren Schwerd received her BFA in Studio Art from Tulane University in New Orleans in 1993, and her MFA in Sculpture from Syracuse University in New York in 1999. She was an instructor and visiting Assistant Professor at the College of Charleston from 1999 to 2005, and is currently an Assistant Professor of Sculpture at the Louisiana State University School of Art in Baton Rouge. Her installations, videos, costumes, and sculpture have been exhibited nationally at the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art in Winston-Salem, NC; Mobile Museum of Art, AL; Penland School of Crafts in North Carolina; Louisiana Artworks in New Orleans; Urban Institute for Contemporary Art in Grand Rapids, MI; and the Dana Women Artists Series at Rutgers in New Brunswick, NJ.
artist statement
My artistic practice includes site-related installations, wearable art, video, and sculptures that are inspired and shaped by the impulse to transform familiar objects into metaphorical constructions and paradoxical observations. I investigate the multiple associations that are present in a material, site, image, or gesture, seeking to identify and enhance points of connection and tension between these suggestions. I favor found materials that contribute their function, cultural value, and a trace of their mysterious personal history to my design. All of my projects demonstrate a dedication to craft. I employ basic methods of connection such as tying, weaving, and stitching, imbuing my work with a feminine sensibility, and whose meticulous labor evokes a sense of time, memory, and obsession. Permeating all of my creative endeavors is a slightly dark humor and a fascination with awkward beauty.
My current project, Mourning Portrait, began as a series of memorials to the communities of New Orleans that were devastated by the federal levee breaches that followed Hurricane Katrina. These commemorative objects are made from human hair extensions of the type commonly used by African-American women that I found outside the St. Claude Beauty Supply store. The portraits draw on the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century traditions of hairwork, in which family members or artisans would fashion the hair of the deceased into intricate jewelry and other objects as symbols of death and rebirth. The series began with the small houses. Working from my own photographs, I create metal armatures that act as frameworks for weaving the hair into portraits of the vacant houses of the Ninth Ward neighborhood. By documenting private homes, I venerate the city's losses, both individual and collective.
In the two years that I have been researching and executing this work, the series has expanded into a larger body of objects and images that utilize a broader range of techniques and provide a richer context for the houses, such as sculptures shaped from found wigs, which combine imagery from Victorian hair wreaths with contemporary, sculptural, African-American hair fashions. Hair serves as the essential metaphor of this work, by evoking a sense of profound intimacy and absence, by referring to Victorian mourning practices, and by suggesting the racial factors that have paralyzed the city's recovery effort.
