The Watkins Gallery will exhibit the latest sculptures by AU alumna and former professor Jennie Lea Knight until Oct. 23. The small wooden farm animals on display represent a new style for Knight, whose career has been built on large abstract sculptures since it began in the 1950s.
Knight was recently diagnosed with fibromyalgia, an incurable degenerative disease that causes pain in muscles and joints. Unable to undertake the physically demanding techniques required to make her signature sculptures, she sought a new form for her art.
"Initially I couldn't think of what I was going to do with myself," Knight said. "It was just plain painful work with the heavy machinery [required to create the large sculptures]. I knew I couldn't just sit there and watch television all day. I had to do something. Then I stopped thinking about what I couldn't do, but what I could do."
She says she saw an advertisement in a catalogue for a set of carving knives and decided to try whittling chunks of scrap wood in her studio. She began to create delicate pieces out of mahogany and bass wood only a few inches in height and width.
The animal sculptures, inspired by the livestock on Knight's Virginia farm, sit atop plain white pedestals of differing heights in the gallery. She designed the exhibition, but this is the first one she didn't install herself.
Jonathan Bucci, curator of the Watkins Gallery, and his staff set up the exhibit. Knight said she is pleased with how it turned out and appreciates Bucci's help.
"I think it looks terrific," she said, "These people [at the Watkins Gallery] are just fantastic. I just can't think of any way they could have been more helpful."
During her years as an AU student, she says she was most inspired by professors Robert Gates and Bill Calfee. She hopes today's students will learn about artistic vision through her exhibit.
"I would hope it would teach [students] to use their eyes. Your eye is the most powerful tool you have. You can answer all of your questions just by using your eye," she said. "Learning how to see is the most important thing anyone can teach you."
Bucci says that AU art professors plan to take students to the exhibition as part of their classes but added, "It's not just [an exhibition for] the sculpture students. It's the drawing students too, as well as many of the other students on campus that have a lot they can learn from this."
The Watkins Gallery holds five exhibitions every year by a variety of artists to give students the opportunity to see several different styles, Bucci said.
"The idea of exhibiting artists who are at different parts in their career allows students to understand that creating art is a lifelong process," he said.
