A casual conversation with a poet friend in the late nineties still echoes in my studio. She was planning to write a book about famous people who had been adopted. Adoption is a topic of special interest to both of us and I asked whom she'd include. Her celebrity list was long...concluding with Superman and Moses. Moses' mother, of course, put her three-month old in an "ark" of bulrushes, lined with slime and pitch and laid it in the river in order to save his threatened life.

The idea of Moses being placed into the basket and drifting down the river is complex and slippery. The choreography of placing, being placed into the basket, the basket placed into the water, conjures an image loaded with mystery and portent. I kept returning to the moment of setting out on a journey without knowing the destination, and wondered what that would be like. I imagined lying on my back, seeing only the sky moving, cast into the complete unknown. It's that slip of a moment -- suspended and vulnerable, not knowing what to expect, that I think about and want to make visible in this work. As a triptych: I saw one extended hand, letting go, the boat itself, and one hand receiving. I glimpsed the image as mathematics; an equation, a subtraction with alternating loss and gain. The image of a small vessel has become a metaphor with universal implications. The image of hands, boats, and water became exponentially more haunting on 9/11 and continues.

Chairs have had enduring potential as subjects. The structure of a chair is often exquisitely simple and neutral enough to speak through. Chairs are often portraits of those who sit there. One's shape, weight, posture, and persona are recorded there like an alter ego. Before 9/11, the chair form referenced cloth, pattern, '50's Americana. They sat loaded with innuendo, metaphor, and denial. World events have altered this image toward austerity; stripping all artifice back to structure; they stand skinned to the bone. Some chair forms present the back without the invitation of the front. These forms are linear, simplified, and reductive. Completed, the remaining sgraffito'd lines trace perpendicular ghosts, reaching to weave.

Nancy Brett
New York City, April 2006