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This booklet was published for the occasion of Hermine Ford:Follow Me exhbition.
Nathalie Karg Gallery is pleased to present HERMINE FORD: FOLLOW ME, an exhibition featuring eight works by the artist on view from September 4 through October 12, 2024.
Follow Me is an invitation to enter into Ford’s paintings—the takeaway being an experience personal to the viewer and not dictated by the artist. Ford’s paintings are an accumulation of observations, and her perspective is honed by watching and experiencing how cities and their neighborhoods change, build, and destroy themselves.
Rome is a second city for Ford. There, ancient streets and heroic buildings have been rebuilt from rubble and filled with fragments of century-old mosaics. This history inspires Ford’s textures and patterns that evoke the natural world while embracing an urban world, too. She connects these experiences while drawing inspiration for many years from her summer studio in Nova Scotia, where she collects rocks while walking her beach. More recently, though entirely unintended, several works seem to observe orbiting spheres of celestial bodies in the night sky.
Dedicated to reconceptualizing these experiences, Ford leads viewers to reflect on how the past translates into the present in a constantly changing and adapting world.
“All we are, all we see, is nature,” Ford expresses. “Things grow. Or are made. Maybe by a human being, maybe by a bird or a bee. We make objects of all sizes, buildings, art. Then they get old, sometimes are torn down, even made to disappear, by water, wind, war, volcanoes, earthquakes, tornadoes, floods, or fire. Or they fall from their weight or are pushed over, stepped on, shot at, blown up, or smashed. Yet, the pure material remains. The materials have been reused through the ages. Architecture, painting, and sculpture are made from these raw and recycled materials. An artist's eye and hand move over the materials while at the beach, visiting an Italian city, or in the studio, remembering them as they used to be and rearranging them: the broken buildings, the stones, the tiles, the pigments. In my work, I'm reimagining the past, making it present.”
