Lillian Trettin

Lillian Trettin
Mount Pleasant, South Carolina, USA

STATEMENT

From 2011 to 2015, I made colorful cut paper collages inspired by Southern literature and lore. Flannery O’Connor and Edgar Allan Poe are favorite sources of inspiration, but my results are not illustrations. Rarely do the images spell everything out; they prompt the viewer to ask questions. My aim is to entice with enigma, the pleasurable sense of an unresolved mystery embedded in the image. From 2016 to 2019 I specialized in paper cuts, often of Tyvek in black or metallic colors. Starting in 2020, with the pandemic and recent political events as inspiration, I returned to collage using layers of cut and torn images and various papers (including newsprint and magazine), as well as inkjet printed Tyvek. To my mind, the sensibility is still Southern Gothic: rich colors and complicated patterns, profusion of vegetation and insects, hospitality and danger. Today I specialize in collage, especially on Tyvek scrolls for hanging in temporary living spaces like camping tents, not just in houses or on institutional walls. I also like to work small, actually tiny when possible. I’m a fan of Art-o-Mat. I like the idea of adding little originals to geo caching boxes. Public and community art are my preferred focus these days.

BIO

I grew up in East Tennessee and am (as so many Southerners claim) permanently South haunted. After many years of higher education, starting with a fine arts degree and ending with a PhD in American Culture, I taught and conducted research at institutions in Michigan, North Carolina, and South Carolina. In 2011 I returned to making art (cut paper collage and paper cuts) full time and participated in 19 exhibits in four states over the next six years. In 2013, I was one of three artists selected for the annual Piccolo Spoleto exhibit in Charleston SC. I held a solo exhibit at the William King Art Museum in Abington VA in 2016. The next year I participated in group exhibits at the Del Rey Art Center in Alexandria VA, where I received a “curator’s award” at one exhibit and and a “viewers’ favorite award” at another.

ARTIST CONTACT

[click to email]
lilliantrettin.wordpress.com

IMAGES