• Home
  • Work
  • Artist
  • Exhibitions
  • Press
  • Blog
  • Representation

Teresa Cole

Hoop Skirt Press

  • Work
  • Artist
  • Exhibitions
  • Press
  • Blog
  • Representation

Exhibitions

  • All Exhibitions
  • Solo Exhibitions
  • Installations
  • Group Exhibitions

Transfer

June 3, 2010 - July 22, 2010
Gallery Bienvenu
New Orleans, LA
Solo Exhibitions

With their multiple layers of richly allusive, cross-cultural imagery, Teresa Cole’s prints uncover missing links between pattern and meaning, ornamentation and narrative. They occupy a rare common ground between visual seduction and conceptual engagement, employing innovative techniques and lush iconography to explore the commonalities of human experience. The installation, screen prints, and woodcut relief prints on paper and fabric that make up the artist’s Gallery Bienvenu exhibition draw inspiration from her trips to India to research the origins of pattern.

Within these lavish compositions, the viewer will find motifs adapted from the Adalaj step well near Ahmedabad, the ornate wall carvings of a mogul palace in Jaipur, and a baroque array of serpentine flourishes, scrolls, and motifs from the animal and vegetal worlds. These elements jostle and flow together in vignettes that evoke the frenetic, eye-opening wonder of traveling to foreign lands. “In art,” Cole observes, “we use pattern a lot, but very often its meaning is lost. It might allude to identity, but it’s rarely clear what a given pattern actually means. In Indian culture, there are narratives that are so well known that they have become pattern.”

A professor of printmaking at Tulane University, Cole has seen her works exhibited and collected in galleries and museums around the globe. The works are renowned for their virtuosic graphic sophistication, which, upon closer inspection, rewards the viewer with an intense texturality and translucence arising from the layering of inks, cut papers, and fabrics. Some of Cole’s prints resplend with silver leaf on tarlatan fabric, an unusual integration of media blending Indian traditions and Western printmaking techniques. In these works, as across her output, she acts as a transferrer of optical effects and the cultural coding embedded within them. This essentially syntactical enterprise, in Cole’s hands, is never less than visually ravishing, a testament to the crux of her thesis: that mark-making and meaning are one and the same.
June 4 – July 22, 2010

Transfer evite
Blossom Pattern, intaglio printed collagraph, 48”h x 12”w, 2006
Excavation, (relief print, 48” x 84”, 2009)
Snake I, relief on paper, puff paint screen print on fabric, 30' x 25', 2009

From the Blog

Cicadas, Paper Pulp and a typhoon

December 13, 2014 Filed Under: Art, Japan, Papermaking, Travel Tagged With: Japan, papermaking

The word washi translates as Japanese paper, and contrary to popular belief Japanese paper is not made from rice. Most sheets are produced from the inner bark of Mulberry trees, that are grown as large shrubs and harvested once the Read more…

© 2023 Teresa Cole.