Interview with Katie Bonadies, December 2024
Dianne K. Webb is a theater director, writer, and visual artist who has been at Running With Scissors since May 2023. For a long time, Dianne felt as though she had to identify as one type of artist, "When I was a beginning artist I didn't come out for a long time because I thought I had to be something and I'm not one thing." The inclination to work in multiple media is deeply entwined with Dianne's sense of self. They were finally able to accept their interest in working in diverse media when they saw the Vincent Van Gogh retrospective at MOMA in which every room was a display of how Van Gogh played with media, form, and function that resulted in a tremendously varied body of work. Before this revelation Dianne had identified as a painter because her mother was a painter and that's where she started when she got serious about making art.
Everything they do as an abstract conceptualist is painterly, and they can track a pattern of ‘migration of medium’ and form throughout the evolution of their artistic practice. Dianne’s training came in the form of spending time in art museums where she likes to get up close to paintings to see how the artists put paint on the canvas and create texture. This was before she had any idea she would be a painter. She has been to many museums and has set off an alarm in every single one. Her practice started with pulling elements from natural objects like the pattern on a rock and blowing up its design, form, shape and texture so that it was no longer recognizable. They started taking painting more seriously when they were invited to join their first show while living in Houston. Six weeks later Dianne had her first studio outside of her home. The space allowed Dianne to immerse herself in play and let go of the limits of what she thought she could do.
Making art is Dianne’s way of accessing the collective unconscious, “It’s where I can know what I can’t figure out. Where I can let something move through me that is resolving something for me, even if it’s not articulate.” Making art gives Dianne the chance to get out of her brain’s way and let it do its own work. Creating directly on the canvas is how she usually articulates the concept, but Dianne didn’t know what she was thinking in her current series until she started discussing it out loud.
She knew the concept was about migrations and that the work had to be textured and rooted in the earth. She knew that it had to do with feeling like an outsider, which is a recurring theme in Dianne’s professional and artistic work. It is also a reflection of her lived experiences. Dianne has put herself in outsider situations throughout her life where she works with many different kinds of people and cultures. This practice has made her more sensitive, and she tries to be cognizant of how she is seen.
Belonging is on her mind a lot these days. Dianne is currently writing a PhD dissertation on migration and identity in plural societies. She holds a degree in Human Development and an MFA as well. Their work is focused on the diasporic reality of belonging. They care about how we are who we are and how we fit in the scheme of all living things. They are very interested in learning how people become American or become part of something. Her desire to understand how society creates outsider identity stems from growing up without a strong connection to her family’s cultural heritage. She knew she couldn’t research and write her dissertation on assimilation without knowing her own family’s history of migration. Her research has filled in a lot of the blanks and has enriched her understanding of other peoples’ experiences.
These concepts of migration and plurality are reflected in her art. The work is about the narrative of lifetimes and pathways and how they go through different territories. For Dianne the idea speaks to the medium. The series she is working on now uses multiple kinds of inks and paper and cloth that overlap. There is no waste and the paper covering her work surface that catches the drips becomes the underlayment of subsequent pieces. The sewing and stitching of the work are representative of typography and pathways and how we move and migrate. An amorphous collection of tiny ink dots migrates across each piece en masse like the shadows cast by a flock of birds as they
move above the ground. The diversity of
material and how they come together as a whole is representative of the people in a plural society. For the merging of what Dianne is thinking about for her dissertation and what's she doing in her art, working in multiple media brings her right to the point: "[Plural society] is interesting because of its component pieces." No medium is unavailable to her; she just has to learn it. She frequently collects organic objects that become incorporated in how she creates. The current series is being created with their own handmade brushes made from materials like grass or cotton or feathers, flax fiber, leaves, or even seaweed that dries and hardens and becomes supple again with the wet of the inks. All of the marks in her current series were made by these brushes, bringing the natural world and natural resources into what she’s doing. This process gives the work a sense of place.
Dianne is really happy to be back home and making art in Maine. When she moved back, she purposely moved to the most diverse neighborhood in the state, the East Bayside neighborhood of Portland. She wants her granddaughter to see people who look like her when she visits. Dianne is also interested in immigrants who have recently moved to Portland and how Maine claims them. "Migration has always gone on, in humans and in animals," she says as she wonders what our relation is to place. She wonders what it is we lose in claiming place over lineages or customs or languages; what we lose when we hold onto something constructed like the idea of Maine or the U.S. She wonders how this affects where we are today. What would happen is we stopped worrying about the things that make us different? If we accepted ourselves for who we are and others for who they are? If we stopped worrying about borders and possession of land?
To learn more about Dianne’s work and to view it, contact them through their website dianne k. webb or through email, dianne@diannekwebb.com.
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