Artists

Artist Bio

Part collector, part craftsman, part designer, Abigail Anne Newbold utilizes a domestic vocabulary to create objects and installations that examine issues of comfort, survival and portability. Born in Boston, she received her Bachelor of Fine Arts from Massachusetts College of Arts, Boston and her Master of Fine Arts in Fiber from Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, MI. Newbold, whose work has been published in both Dwell and American Craft, exhibits internationally and continues to collaborate on local design-build projects, as well as fostering commissions for both quilts and furniture. She has taught at the College for Creative Studies, Detroit and the Haystack Mountain School of Craft, Deer Isle, ME; while working as the Exhibitions Preparator at Cranbrook Art Museum. She currently resides in Pleasant Ridge, MI. www.abigailanne.com

ArtX Project Description

Title: Home Maker series
Medium:
Year Created: 2011
Description: Abigail Anne Newbold is interested in cognitive and kinesthetic understandings of home, and the tempting notion of learning to provide shelter for herself in an increasingly more complicated superstructure of society. Her installation, Home Maker series, showcases an on-going series of kits that build on one-another to culminate in the ability to build a home from the ground up. Straddling the vestiges of traditional craft, DIY design sensibilities, and the beginnings of an anthropological survey of domesticity, Newbold’s work illustrates in physical dimensions a conflict in how we live. We are at once torn between an increased availability and reliance on the product market, and a desire for more personalized living. As function and utility are spoon-fed to us, what happens when we look critically at the building blocks of our homes and our home tools—those essential instruments that ultimately help to define the character of our spaces? What happens if we leave the fold of the big-box-store and we begin to craft our own tools and build our own homes? How would our relationship with our homes change? Created from financial necessity and paired with our inescapable human need for shelter to survive, Newbold finds irony in this era of exponential new technologies that there are also opportunities for individuals to be self-sufficient. We could at once be entering an era of folk architecture- changing the monotony of the store-bought landscape, and in the process be reviving basic skills of hand-making integral to survival and creativity and this excites her. www.abigailanne.com