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When Aspen-based artist Joslyn Doerge When the mother realized that her little daughter suffered from dyslexia, she encouraged her to express herself through art.
“I was very lucky because I’m dyslexic, and that wasn’t something we talked about in the ’80s. But my mother, who was also an artist, was able to see that in me and help me figure out how to turn it into a superpower,” Doerge recalls. “Eventually, I found that reading and writing didn’t come easily to me, but I was good at expressing myself through images, which led me to become an artist because in art, images say more than words.”
It was a discovery that shaped her life. While studying at the Art Institute in Chicagoshe developed a love for scientific illustration because she was interested in taking things apart to understand how they work.
Out of necessity, she eventually discovered pyrography. Early in her career, she found that galleries had difficulty offering and selling her work on paper because it was very large and expensive to frame. She realized that putting her illustrations on larger wooden panels would solve the framing problem and also alleviate people’s concerns about the durability of the work on paper.
“Pyrography is Latin for ‘writing with fire.’ You take a burning tool and use it on wood or leather or whatever to create an illustration,” she explained. “So it’s almost like etching in the sense that you have to make the drawing first, then make the template and transfer that template before using the fire tool. Some people can do it freehand, but basically it’s fire drawing.”
After living and working in Telluride for several years, Doerge made her way to Aspen 10 years ago.
“I had gotten as far as I could with the art world there and wanted to expand my horizons,” she said. “In Aspen, my audience was a little more sophisticated.”
During this time she made contact with Peter Hopkins, the founder of the SHIM Art Networkan art exhibition service network that provides resources for artists, curators, galleries, and nonprofits through its exhibitor groups. She was invited to Art Basel, where she and Hopkins had conversations about neurodivergence and art.
“He was very interested in this whole neurodivergence and art as a way of expressing yourself,” she said. “Artists with neurodivergence operate a little differently, which can make it a little more difficult for us to pull off certain things. We’ve been exploring how neurodivergent people think and how that changes the way we work, and playing with that in the artwork that’s being created this year.”
This summer, Doerge was the first artist sent by the SHIM Art Network to participate in an artist-in-residence program at the Kolbermoor Art Academy in Germany. She joined the program this summer from August 4 to 15 to work on a series of pieces that will be exhibited at the Venice Biennale from September 3 to November 3.
The pieces going to Venice explore the themes of her “inside-out brain.”
“In my work there, I played with fractals in the human body,” she said.
She calls the pieces a “Botanical Organ Series,” which consists of a “fern brain,” a “bleeding heart,” and an “artichoke womb.”
“After doing the wood burning part of these pieces, I mixed several layers of acrylic medium with a crushed iridescent mineral and layered them so that the color of the artwork changes with the light,” she said. “It also reflects the passage of time. The concept is that the pieces are constantly changing, just as we are constantly changing. I’m excited to see what people think of it.”
Sarah Girgis is arts and entertainment editor for The Aspen Times. Reach her at 970-429-9151 or [email protected].
