Nancy Brett

From the artist’s website:

Nancy Brett is a visual artist from Detroit, currently living and working in NYC. She earned a Master of Fine Arts from Cranbrook Academy of Art and a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Wayne State University. She’s the recipient of many prestigious grants and fellowships that include the Individual Support Grant from the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation, The Pollock-Krasner Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, and six consecutive Residency Fellowships from Yaddo, among others. Ms. Brett's work is represented in many private and public collections that include The Library of Congress, The Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney, Australia, The Herbert F. Johnson Museum at Cornell University, and The National Gallery in Washington, DC., among others.

Ms. Brett is a painter and a weaver. Her work leans toward formalism and apparent simplicity. To her, the ancient tradition of weaving is personal, both in structure and metaphor. Brett's painting references her strong background in weaving and in drawing. With intersections, plaids, architecture, and more, her work examines the loaded relationship between drawing and handwriting, text and textiles.

Her work is not as much based on the grid as it is on individual lines that accrue and traverse each other and the page. The lines measures distance, respond to edges, and predict what follows as they build a sense of a 2D plane. She follows the path of the line as she makes it.

Specifically, Brett examinies the translation of thought to language, the relationship of language to handwriting, and comparies handwriting to drawing.

For Ms. Brett, one of the most engaging aspects of weaving is how literal it is. and that process, image, and object are inseparable.