By Alexa Nogueira | Observer Contributor
Photos by Alexa Nogueira
Deborra Stewart-Pettengill is a South Carolina native who specializes in abstract art. On Thursday, March 1, she held a Gallery Talk for her art exhibit at Mount Wachusett Community College.
The Gallery Talk had a big turnout, which consisted of art students working in 2-D and fans of Stewart-Pettengill who had visited the exhibit several times throughout the week.
The event itself was hosted by Joyce Miller, a professor at MWCC who runs the college’s art gallery.
Stewart-Pettengill’s passion for art began when she was four years old with a red clay bank in her backyard, where she would sculpt and mold things out of clay. She would later grow up to become a sculptor with a love for pottery and sculpted for 30 years after graduating from college.
She changed her focus to abstract art after being invited to a residency in Ireland, where the only material she was able to work with was tarlatan, which is a gauzy cloth strengthened with starch.
While in Ireland, Stewart-Pettengill worked extensively with the tarlatan material, imagining the motion of water as she manipulated the tarlatan with her hands.
When she returned from Ireland, she abandoned the tarlatan material and began to work with aluminum wire mesh, which is stiffer.. The pieces in her exhibit at MWCC were all exclusively made with aluminum wire mesh. The black and silver pieces are her earlier works, while the colored pieces are more recent.
Stewart-Pettengill attempts to catch a different mood with each piece, and often finds herself feeling inspired by the weather and things that she finds in nature.
Each piece has a different inspiration; she is influenced by the force of water, motion, stasis, working together as a unit, pulling apart and working alone, and “defying gravity”.
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