The Sarah Moody Gallery of Art presented a lecture by Courtney Childress, an Alabama graduate and artist working out of New York City, on Tuesday to discuss her sculptures made out of crayons.
Childress graduated from UA with her BFA in painting, then moved to Boston, where she attended the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University before receiving her Master of Fine Arts from Purchase College in New York.
Throughout the course of her education, Childress engaged in a variety of professional experiences that shaped her current work. Before leaving Tuscaloosa, she taught elementary school art in Northport, where low budgets led her to keep any and all supplies available.
“Half the time I was handed bags of broken crayons that nobody wanted,” Childress said. “I carried these around for years … and then finally, it was one of those moments where I was like ‘OK, you either have to do something with this or get rid of them.’”
Inspired by these discarded pieces and a childhood memory of melted crayons, Childress began to create colorful sculptures using the artistic outcasts.
As time passed, she developed her method in order to avoid her smaller sculptures being taken from her galleries. She took a rather direct approach to combat this thievery: chaining her pieces to walls, morphing them into interactive displays, and eventually just making them so large that they couldn’t be stolen — as big as 30 pounds.
Creating these pieces is a unique process, involving a handmade plywood box, vinyl sheets similar to shower curtains, and aluminum foil lining as a vessel for melted crayon wax.
The use of crayons in her art reflects one of Childress’s primary artistic goals — to take materials that are typically seen as mere craft supplies and turn them into fine art.
“[I like] the idea of making Art with a capital ‘A’ out of a crappy craft material that doesn’t belong in a museum and isn’t taken seriously,” Childress said. “You don’t have to just make things out of the normal stuff.”
More recently, Childress has been exploring this ideology by combining felting, which is a method typically used to create small wool figurines, and ice dyeing, a technique that Childress originally discovered on TikTok, to create abstract wall hangings.
This new medium has allowed Childress to further develop her style.
“Every time I would make one, I would learn something new about the piece as I was making it,” Childress said. “I’m really led by the material and the fun of things.”
This evolution and penchant for experimentation is evident in Childress’s work. Each piece is different, creating a diverse body of work where each canvas has a different color scheme, technique and composition. Some of her pieces are reminiscent of people whereas others are largely nonrepresentational. These more abstract expressionist arrangements leave something to be desired, often looking incomplete as opposed to intentional.
“It looks like something you would bring home from kindergarten,” said Kaitlyn Johnson, a senior management information systems major. “It’s very abstract.”
