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Afterlife

Pat Trevisan Woods's recycled art

by Leon Nigrosh

SUCCESSION: PRINTS AND PAPER PAST AND PRESENT By Pat Trevisan Woods at the ARTSWorcester Gallery at Quinsigamond Community College, 670 West Boylston Street, through December 19.

Consummate printmaker Pat Trevisan Woods has been a part of the Worcester art scene for a long time. She taught at the Craft Center way back when, worked in the public school system for many years, and has taught printmaking at Clark University for the past 15 years. But we haven't had the opportunity to really examine her work for quite some time.

A solo exhibition at Quinsigamond Community College is made up of 31 works selected from Woods's private collection, which exemplify her evolving direction and stylistic changes throughout the past 10 years. Her earlier work was primarily figurative and usually involved woodcut relief prints. During the late '70s, when her teaching commitments completely usurped her personal studio time, she was relegated to doing tiny geometric drawings -- some no more than one-inch square -- just to retain her sanity.

Woods soon turned these tiny drawings into her "Quilt Series,'' several of which serve as the exhibit's introduction. These large prints, like Nine or Night Lights, are richly textured with layers of color and bits of paper cut from stencils and imbedded in the monoprint. The first print draws its title from the subtle Roman numeral that emerges through the complex pattern, the second appears to be bright lights of big city windows and alleyways piercing the darkness. Although the two works evoke completely different aesthetic considerations, a close comparison reveals that both were made from the same Plexiglas plate. Woods refers to this process as "recycling" -- something she continues to do with greater frequency as her work progresses.

Combining her love of quilts with their historic connotations and abstract qualities (similar to Ellsworth Kelly's contemporary paintings) along with her abiding interest in nature, Woods next produced several series of "Nature Quilt'' etchings. Among the more imaginative of these prints are Bee Quilt I and Bee Quilt II. These delicate, filigree etchings are hand-tinted with watercolors and contain images produced by imprinting plants, grasses, and -- to give a lifelike quality to the print -- real bees!

Moving from quilts to costumes was a logical next step -- and a practical one. People used the originals to keep warm, create a sense of history, or as a means of identification. Woods combined all of these approaches in her large mixed-media garment representations such as Tudor Bodice and Green Tea Dress. With a leftover quilt print as a base, Woods incorporated cast-off materials such as onion bags, the cardboard matrix from the inside of a hollow-core door, snippets of her own reject prints, used tea bags, and other humble objects, and turns them into richly ornate robes and tunics.

Just for fun, Woods has conjured up some small collages like the sprightly Candy Dancer Dress, made entirely from Japanese ginger candy wrappers, and the elegant After Eight Evening Coat, constructed from After Eight mint wrappers. Both of these works, and others in the series, are a riot of color and pattern derived from the commercial printed image and by the way Woods folded and combined the separate units.

A group of free-hanging "Pocket Books'' made of handmade paper and found objects such as wasp nests, porcupine needles, and grass reed is a short side trip in Woods's continuing path toward her goal of representing the concept of "succession" -- the progression of life communities as they move from one stage to the next.

This movement in her own life is portrayed in several small "triptychs'' and "altar pieces'' that were influenced by a trip to Venice, where she discovered that her family roots go back to the 16th century. During that period, one of her ancestors was a doge who had his portrait, which still hangs in City Hall, painted by Jacopo Tintoretto. The revelation made Woods decide to include her historical family name, Trevisan, as part of her own.

At first glance, her latest objects may seem like complete departures from all her previous endeavors. They involve no printmaking techniques, are monochromatic, large in scale, and border on total abstraction. Made of washed, dried, and folded used coffee filters, Kimono and Beetle Cape are the culmination of her recycling efforts. By reworking cast-off industrial materials into images of surface adornment for both man and beast, she brought together all her attempts to portray an ecological balance between humans and nature, even if only for a moment.

Gallery hours are Monday through Friday from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. Call 853-2300.