MONOLITHS
Dawn Bassett
June 6 - June 23, 2024
MONOLITHS
Noun
1. A single great stone often in the form of a monument or column
MONOLITHS, the latest body of work created by the artist Dawn Bassett, seeks to grapple with the power of time over the idea of Home.
Told in the language of 2,000 year old Moroccan plaster, Tadelakt, Bassett tries to discover what home is, what home is now, what home was in the past and possibly the future. Is home a timeless idea or an ephemeral place? Does home exist in a space at all or is it only memory of another time, or feeling in a particular moment?
Created as monuments to these times, places, and ideas, each work is a story in stone. The material containing obsidian glass particles, lime and calcite pulverized and mixed into a mud with water form the plaster used for thousands of years as the finish on buildings in Morocco. Due to its composition, light enters and then birefracts out of the calcite crystals and volcanic glass dust. Depending on the time of day and angle of the sunlight, the surface glows golden yellow, purest white, even peachy pinks. Time is just as integral to Bassett’s work as the material itself.
This exhibit is on view at Gambrel Gallery from June 6 until July 13, 2024.
Artist bio:
Dawn Bassett is something of an outlier in the world of fine art. She didn’t have any artists in her family; she grew up far from any town, in the mountains where a career in the arts was as close as a walk on the moon. She didn’t go to art school, and she didn’t chart an immediate path into a career in fine art. But since childhood, Dawn’s vivid mindscape and ability to create with her hands what those visions entailed, has been core to her very existence.
As a young adult, Dawn carved a prolific channel into the architecture and design community. She opened her first successful business at the age of 23, combining object design and hand-sewing to create custom lighting pieces, as well as building relationships with designers and architects, undertaking apprenticeships, and showcasing thousands of her pieces in luxury projects.
While running her design business, Dawn discovered lime-based plaster and saw untapped potential. Largely self-taught, she dedicated the better part of the last two decades to mastering the forms of architectural plaster, all the while experimenting and planting seeds for a breathing body of artwork that stands in stark relief against a backdrop of plaster as a static finish. With pilgrimages and residencies around the world, she obtained as much knowledge as she could gather about fine plasters. With techniques developed by herself through innovation and experimentation, a more than 2,000 year old formula for a Moroccan building material, tadelakt, exploded into a new artistic medium. In this new genre, you see the transformation of a prosaic time-worn architectural finish into a new language backed by a voice dedicated to unlocking its secrets while preserving the material’s mystique and curating the artist’s own wonder.