by Joanne O'Sullivan / photos by Steve Mann

A Spruce Pine sculptor hides her edgy messages in the layers. 

Political art requires a deft touch. Strong-arm your viewers and you risk losing them. Let your medium overwhelm your message and you fail to make an impression. With her mixed-media sculpture, Spruce Pine artist Anne Lemanski hits something of a sweet spot between form and content—as you look at one of her pieces, its message might sneak up on you.

The silly, flirty wigs in A Century of Hair, 1900-1990 seem to give you a wink before rattling your conscience into thinking seriously about society’s perceptions of beauty. The nearly life-size cow in Got Bovine Growth Hormone? catches your eye with its bright pink hide, then springs an inconvenient little truth on you: those aren’t spots on her skin—those are syringes, pumping Bessie full of BGH. Lemanski tackles big issues with a subtle approach that’s neither overly earnest nor too superficial. Maybe that’s why she’s one of just six artists showcased in Possibilities: Rising Stars of Contemporary Craft in North Carolina at the Mint Museum of Craft + Design in Charlotte through November 30. 

Using simple, familiar images—a  shark, a gun, a rat—creates a platform from which people can relate to her work. “Everyone brings their own story to it,” she says. But at the same time, her work tackles abstract, global political issues that affect us all: urban sprawl and habitat destruction, genetically modified food, war, guns and women’s roles in society. “My work is my way of speaking about what’s happening now,” she says. 

Dana Moore, program director at Penland School of Crafts where Lemanski was recently an artist in residence, says Lemanski always begins with the content, whether or not she knows how she’ll make the object.  “She has to figure out the mechanics each time to make it come across,” she says.

Mechanics are often what one wonders about, viewing a piece of Lemanski’s sculpture. If the works seem like they would be incredibly research-intensive and labor-intensive, that’s because they are. Each one requires tremendous patience. No Pollock-like inspired improvisation here—everything has to be thought out, starting with flexible copper rods and wires. Then she bends and brazes (a heat process similar to welding) them into a frame known in sculptors’ terms as an armature. 

Lemanski covers the armature with what she calls a skin—it’s the only material the viewer sees. She’s drawn to using vintage paper or homemade materials, but she’ll use whatever she needs to get her message across. The skin used for each decade in A Century of Hair reflects societal undercurrents that affected women of the time—tooled copper for the rigid Gibson Girl hair of the early 1900s, bright red acetate with Barbie-doll shoes for the Jell-O mold ‘do of the 1950s.

To fit the skin to the armature, Lemanski first creates scrap-paper patterns and then traces the shape onto her chosen material.  She cuts the pieces and stitches them onto the frame, hoping she’s calculated correctly. “It all relies on the armature,” she says. “There is some give, but you can’t go back and put the torch to it if it doesn’t work.” With a combination of experience and intuition, she manages to tailor the skin to the armature every time. “Her work shows incredible craftsmanship,” says Moore. 

Also distinctive is the combination of skills she uses: metalwork, usually considered a masculine technique, coupled with stitching, a historically feminine skill. “She has solid skills in both areas,” says Rob Williams, the Mint consulting curator who developed the Rising Stars show. “But she’s not using them in the traditional way.”

Although her work is starting to get attention these days, Lemanski’s star didn’t rise over night. After an undergraduate degree in fine arts from the College of Creative Studies in Detroit, the Michigan native moved to Chicago and started working in a frame shop. While dealing with the fallout of a painful divorce, she turned back to a technique that she first experimented with in college—stretching rawhide over copper. Her first pieces were personal in nature—an anatomical heart, an iron, a “girly” handgun. She started to show and sell her work at galleries and at the frame shop where she worked, continuing to refine her technique. 

As issues in her personal life resolved themselves, she found her work’s focus shifted to the political. She was still making, showing and selling one or two pieces per year, but she didn’t consider herself to be an artist with a capital A—more of a shop manager who made (and sold) art on the side. When she was offered an opportunity to run her own shop, Lemanski felt it was time to choose: make a steady living or make art. 

Being accepted to a three-year residency at Penland gave her the chance to bring her artwork front and center. But going from 40-hour-a-week shopkeeper to full-time artist was a huge transition, Lemanski says. Feeding off the energy of other Penland artists gave her the focus she needed, and she worked on A Century of Hair for most of the residency. Creating it forced her to “reread history, specifically from a woman’s perspective,” leading her to conclude: “I’m really lucky to have been born in a time when women can make their own choices about their lives.”

From Hair, she moved into creating the forerunners to the life-size animals seen in Possibilities. With these sculptures, the union of medium and message in Lemanski’s work became even more enmeshed. The slender doe in Deerfields wears the imprint of her habitat’s destruction on her skin. Lemanski printed satellite images of an overdeveloped suburban tract onto paper and stitched it onto the deer’s armature in patchwork pieces. The ironic title—the name of a subdivision that obliterated the deer’s fields—reinforces Lemanski’s sneer at such developments. “The opinion that she’s expressing with the work is very strong and critical of corporations,” says Moore. “But it’s tempered by the fact that it’s a beautiful object.”

Lemanski is currently researching a series on Aesop’s Fables, which plays to both her interest in nature and animals and universal morals and ethics. “It’s a natural progression,” she says. The show at the Mint garnered her some attention from a prominent gallery owner, and she’s preparing for her first solo show at Winthrop University in Rock Hill, South Carolina, next January. Williams, for one, will be keeping tabs. “She has something unique and fresh, and I think a new generation of collectors is going to be interested in it,” he says. “She’s making important choices and saying things that are not trite.” She’s an artist whose work is anything but skin deep

More than Skin Deep
The Rising Stars of Contemporary Craft in North Carolina  exhibit runs through November 30 at the Mint Museum in Charlotte. For more info, visit www.mintmuseum.org or check out annelemanski.com.