Today we’d like to introduce you to Sherry Insley. They and their team shared their story with us below:
Sherry Insley is a mixed media artist working primarily in photography, video, printmaking, and artist books. Her current work is a rumination on time and the impermanence of both the emotional and realized landscape of memory. She utilizes light-sensitive materials in both historical and contemporary ways to document and preserve these investigations. Interested in the physicality of photography, her most recent work Temporality, explores how image-making can manipulate and influence the experience of time.
Sherry Insley is a 2023 MAEA Art Educator of the Year nominee, received the 2023 Juror’s Choice award for Maryland Federation of the Arts American Landscapes Exhibit, an MSAC IAA winner, a SURDNA Foundation awardee, and a 2018 Artist in Residence through the Hive Maker Space. She has exhibited her work locally and nationally. She holds undergraduate and graduate degrees from UMBC and MICA. Currently, she is an instructor at Carver Center of the Arts, a nationally recognized audition-based magnet fine arts program. She can be found in Baltimore City most of the time and at the salt marsh the rest of the time.
I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
The biggest struggle is time. As a full-time educator at a competitive and high-achieving arts high school, making space and time for my work is challenging.
As you know, we’re big fans of you and your work. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about what you do?
My current work is a rumination on time, using mixed media and light-sensitive materials in an attempt to document impermanence and memory. I am interested in the physical nature of photography’s relationship to time, and this inquiry consists of several bodies of work that address this concept.
The “Ebb” series asks what it means to use a tool that documents and preserves, to create images that intentionally disappear. Lumen printing, a historic alternative printing process, is ephemeral and the image will degrade over time. Conversely, in the “Ghost Forest” series, the image persists in its reproduction, while the subjects themselves are deteriorating into near disappearance. Can experiences and perceptions become fabrications or by-products of photography? The “Lake Montebello” and “Temporality” series capture the fleeting effect of a temperature inversion over the lake and a city park. The environment is completely transformed and the viewer can find this both calming and/or disorienting.
“Threshold” and “Untethered” further examine these questions by playing with the viewer’s sensory response to the images and sound. Photographic images can serve as witnesses and documents of record, as well as manipulate and influence time. My interests lie in photography’s attempt to order time and preserve memory. In an age where virtually every action and event is recorded and archived, I am intrigued with slowing down and examining this process. These bodies of work include large-scale black-and-white digital photography, video and sound installation, and historic photographic processes.
Specific Projects: The “Ghost Forest” series is an ongoing photographic documentation begun in the summer of 2022. Depicting the emergence of ghost forests along the mid-Atlantic coasts, particularly in the DelMarVa area. When salt water is pushed inland into freshwater ecosystems due to storms, rising sea levels, and climate change, the salinity of the soil becomes too high. The Atlantic White Cedar is particularly susceptible to high salinity and is the first species to die. The skeletal white trunks standing against the lush landscape are sounding the alarm of a changing climate. This stark contrast is both beautiful and disconcerting, creating visual and literal gaps in the density of the forest.
My work with historical alternative processes such as lumen printing and anthotypes, further examines the relationship of photographic images with time and impermanence. The prints cannot be fixed with traditional darkroom chemistry, which is decidedly not environmentally friendly and will fade away in ambient light. In the “Ebb” project, I collected seaweed, and plant material, and found objects from the areas near ghost forests. I contact print onto photographic paper leaving the translucent silhouettes, and attempt to stabilize the images with saltwater. Here salt water is an agent of preservation rather than destruction.
The “Threshold” series captures temperature inversions over the ocean that create a sense of being unmoored due to the obscured horizon. It is an absence of footing and a feeling of disorientation. This atmospheric phenomenon and feeling of uncertainty are temporary, as the horizon vanishes and then reappears.
In “Untethered” a sound and image installation, I am revisiting images from Threshold, and replacing the disappearing visual information with sound. Using low frequencies, reverberations, and higher-pitched tones, I aim to influence the viewer’s sensory response to the images. This too is a temporal state of being as the images and sound fade in and out as the video loops.
Do you have any advice for those just starting?
Take all opportunities available to you, and don’t be afraid to put your work out there.
Any feedback is valuable and you learn from every interaction concerning your work. If you want your artwork to be taken seriously, then don’t treat it like a hobby, treat it like an occupation and the work that it is.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.sherryinsley.com
- Instagram: @sherryinsleyart
