On a brisk and sunny winter morning in Turners Falls, MA, sculptor Fafnir Adamites is at the beloved local spot, the Five Eyed Fox. She is tucked away on a bench, holding her morning cup of coffee, enveloped in sunlight. “It feels like spring in here, I can’t get enough,” she remarks. Adamites has lived in Turners Falls with her partner, sound artist Neil Young, for over a decade, collaborating together on installations, and embedding themselves amongst local artists. Her place in the community is evident, as residents coming in and out of the coffee shop greet her by name, often remarking on her recent work or upcoming events in the community.

The Unwitting Reception of Someone Else’s Secret, 2016 | paper, handmade felt

Adamites has lived in New England her whole life, outside of a two-year stint in Chicago to complete her MFA in Fiber and Material Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. “ I went to UMass for undergrad,” she says. “I think just the depth of different art and music communities that are specifically in Western Massachusetts is a lot of what kept me here after high school, and after college.” She notes that collectives like Flywheel Arts in Easthampton, and the plethora of galleries, artists, and weirdos in the region, have given her little to no reason to leave. In fact, they keep her alive and creative.

Since returning from SAIC in 2015, Adamites has unleashed a prolific amount of solo and group exhibition work. While traditionally engaged with felt making to create various shapes and environments, Adamites has recently turned to paper to construct her most recent installations. “One of the things that makes felt and paper so similar for me,” she explains, “is that both have kind of a physical appeal and a conceptual appeal, too. I call felt and paper chaos structures, because they are not made like a textile is made, in terms of weaving and having a rigid rib, a woven piece. Felt and paper are just chaotic masses of fibers. The paper pulp and the wool, and that idea of having a chaotic mass come together into something usable that can be a surface or a structure in some way on its own, is beautiful to me.”

“Impediment Series” “Impediment 2” Detail Image, 2016 | paper, steel, wood | one of a series of five | 17x7x7

For Adamites, the lure of creating felt and paper is the collaborative process of skill and surrender. Utilizing a “wet process,” she agitates wool and other fibrous material in hot soapy water. She utilizes wool with other wide-weave fibers such as muslin, silk, or burlap to create a unique struggle between the fibers during the felt process. “Wool shrinks and you get this really beautiful surface texture that is very wrinkled and kind of unruly. It takes the sort of rigidity out of the grid. That one material can overtake another material in that way feels empowering.”

The texture of Adamites’ pieces ebb between dark smooth lines of black, sooted paper, where the beauty lies in an up-close examination; and disordered tangles and crumpled masses forming shapes that are both alien and familiar. Her installation The Unwitting Reception of Someone Else’s Secrets feels ghost-like and haunting; her most recent installation, Cryptonyms, at Deerfield Academy, looks strangely post-apocalyptic and alive.

“Supporting Materials 3”, 2016 | paper 5x3x3 | one of a series of 20 small sculptures, detail

Woven deep within her material processes, Adamites meditates “on trauma, memory, and the legacy of emotional turmoil inherited from past generations” to conceptualize her own experiences and to create conversations amongst those who interact with her work. “I like the idea of creating physical spaces or physical pieces that can be sort of a placeholder for those invisible things,” she explains, “like depression, mental illness, and so forth. Whether it is the things we do not want to talk about, or the traumas that are invisible, I want to have a monument to those things now.”

Adamites creates work with the hope of offering a space for individuals “to have conversations with each other about difficult subject matters…the psychic burden and triggers all around us. And that is one of the few things that I can offer to help people, or at least to open some kind of space for dialogue for people to grapple with things that are so hard.” The focus of recent and upcoming work has been in creating “isolation spaces,” where a single person can enter into one of her sculptures and infuse the depths of their own emotions and experiences into her work. “It is not just about me and my grandmothers,” she says, “or whomever from my past. I want it to be something that more people can find their own place in, to tell their own story if they want to.”

The relationship between the fragility and impermanence of textiles, and the invisibility of trauma in everyday life, coalesces in multiple spaces of meaning for Adamites. “The idea that your work may break down and completely disappear seems scary for many people who want to archive their work. I embrace the devalued nature of these materials and their ephemeral state. For me, to work with materials like this is a kind of lesson every day in impermanence, and needing to be flexible and roll with unpredictable changes. It expresses both my conceptual explorations of what may not be seen and the reality that my art can be both fragile and present.”

Fafnir Adamites is a sculptor living and working in Turners Falls, Massachusetts. Her work will be on exhibition at the A.P.E Gallery in Northampton, MA beginning in February 2016 and at the Boston Sculptors Gallery in Spring 2016. For a more intimate look at her work, check her website and news page.

All photographs courtesy the artist.

Top photo:“Dead Reckoning is Subject to Cumulative Errors”, 2016 | paper, MDF panels 16x2x1.5 | part of the “Groundless Wayfinding” exhibit at Greenfield Community College, February 2016

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I arrived at Charon Visionary Art and Tattoo, overlooking Avenue A in Turners Falls Massachusetts, with some cash and no idea what I wanted tattooed on my body (perhaps something on my chest?). Most folks would be nervous…and I certainly was. However, the moment I saw Noel’le Longhaul emerge from their curtained portion of the studio, I knew it’d be a brilliant experience.

Noel’le is a rare combination of nuanced visual artist, revelatory musician, outspoken LGBTQA* advocate, and brilliant tattooer, with a genuinely compassionate personhood and physical presence which can only be described as transcendent. At 25, Noel’le has accomplished and experienced so much, which is undoubtedly present in their tattoos and process, “…a lot of the times [the tattoos] reflect a complicated experience of fraught or difficult femininity that I engage with. They reflect my political standpoint in terms of being pieces that talk about the non-hierarchical organization of organic chaos…they also reflect the landscapes that I grew up in, and have chosen to remain in.”

Photo courtesy Noel’le’s Instagram page

Anyone tattooed in the past five decades knows how a usual session works. There’s some sort of initial consultation, the artists designs the piece, or okays a piece brought in by a client, stencils the work on the customer, then blasts the design onto their body. It’s a cordial, enjoyable and efficient process that I’ve been a part of many times. Since Noel’le did not start tattooing under the supervision of a mentor, essentially developing their skills in a vacuum, her process is much different, “Ultimately, tattooing was, for me, a ritualized process of support for people that I cared about…my body, and what I could do with my body in terms of being in service to their experience…”

Noel’le typically begins with an extended conversation about what you’re looking for, generally, during your tattooing experience. This conversation ranges from psycho-spiritual to purely aesthetic, while Noel’le intently listens and sketches throughout.  Want to build an image based on a personal narrative? Have a vague childhood memory that’s manifested itself as a set of complex motifs throughout your life? Perhaps you have a picture of some cool floral wallpaper from your grandparent’s house – tell or show Noel’le and they’ll accommodate, internalizing your viewpoints while lending their specific blend of surrealism, realism, and expert touch to the design.

Photo courtesy Noel’le’s Instagram page. Pictured, Cozette Lehman

“The conversation aspect of my process is ultimately about finding places where we actually mesh with each other…the tattoos themselves are archives of the process of finding the overlaps and the dissolves of the experiences of the people I’m working with.” After this conversation and several drafts, they draw up a final image, then sculpt a sketch of that final image onto your body. The rest of the session is freehand, based solely on the skin sketches and the final drawing made earlier in the conversation.

What makes their process unique for me, is that it’s inherently more collaborative and empathetic relative to my past experiences. Philosophically speaking, all tattooing is collaborative, unless you’re taking the stick-n-poke needle to yourself or turning the gun on your own leg. Essentially, a tattooing experience with Noel’le is notably collaborative since it’s a design created through thoughtful interaction over hours of intense engagement.

Photo courtesy Noel’le’s Instagram page.

After surveying Noel’le’s portfolio, it’s easy to identify certain themes and visual motifs such as the deep woods, smallness, negative space, and weathered body parts. Since Noel’le’s own humanity and perspective is such a central part of the design process, they can’t help but interject these themes. In addition, to some extent, these themes are partially a product of re-occurring aesthetic requests made by people who choose to tattoo with them, “I think I have one series of visual images, a visual cannon that people identify with to varying degrees. Some people say ‘I just want a landscape like how you make landscapes.’ And other people who need something way more nuanced and strange than that.” The artful accomplishment of the visual language that Noel’le has developed over time, coupled with her uniquely democratic and empathetic process leads to a full calendar of bookings. In fact, I waited nearly eight months to see them.

What’s important about Noel’le’s work, apart from the skillful renderings of ideas and physical objects into eternal bodily signposts, is her existence within the work. In addition, their process is inherently inclusive. People come to Noel’le Longhaul because they want their body to fuse with her rare artistic presence while having their perspectives included and respected. After two hours of conversation, and three hours of nearly continuous tattooing, I was lucky enough to be forever marked by an experience with them.

Got a nicer picture of this piece for @iambeyon. ♡♡♡ #loone #brighthollowtattooing #laughingloone #noellelonghaul #queerwitch #darkart #darkartists #blxckink #btattooing #qttr #transartist #blackworkerssubmission #inkstinctsubmission

A post shared by Noel'le Longhaul (@laughingloone) on Mar 14, 2016 at 4:01pm PDT

Noel’le Longhaul tattoos by appointment at Charon Art Visionary Tattoo in Turners Falls, Massachusetts. They also perform with western Massachusetts-based bands Loone, Mallory, and paper bee. Be on the look-out for a soon-to-be-published book of Noel’le’s writings, art and tattoos from Silver Sprocket Bicycle Club.  

Top photo by Nick Berger

The post Comfort & Discomfort appeared first on Take Magazine.