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CHAPEL HILL A day before she was to arrive in Chapel Hill for the opening of her exhibition “Workv./Work n.” at the Ackland Art Museum, the artist Aldwyth was still finishing a huge scroll-like collage titled “What's Love Got to Do with It?”
The piece is so large, even she has not seen its two sections together because of the space limitations of her home studio.
“I can't turn it loose,” she says in a telephone interview. “I've got a couple more things I want to put on it and then I've got to varnish it, and I'm leaving at 4 o'clock in the morning.”
The 73-year-old artist from Hilton Head Island, S.C., is being honored with her first retrospective, covering 1991 to 2009. The exhibition was organized by Mark Sloan, director of the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art in Charleston and an Aldwyth champion.
Sloan, who says he is devoted to artists who create out of an inner compulsion rather than those who pursue art with a commercial angle, first saw Aldwyth's work several years ago.
“I believe her work needs to be in the Whitney, the MoMA and the Met,” says Sloan. “I think it's time for her to blossom out and become part of this world.”
Aldwyth, who uses the single family name, makes small collages from images cut directly from books and magazines. She made her first large collage after her sister gave her a two-volume Zell's encyclopedia from 1871, sparking the concept to cut every single image from the set and reconfigure them into a work titled “The World According to Zell.”
“Unfortunately, I'm terrible with my books,” she says. “If I see an image, it's gone.”
The resulting artwork is a huge bordered square of intricately configured black-and-white images laid out in a careful plan of borders and medallions that took more than five years to create. Though it would appear such an effort took unimaginable pre-planning, Aldwyth insists that she does not precisely calculate these seemingly intensely orchestrated pieces.
“I never know what it's going to look like,” she says. “It will surprise me how it turns out.”
