For artist Anna Warfield, plush isn’t just reserved for teddy bears — it’s a medium capable of expressing the intricacies of sexuality and gender relations.
Warfield, 25, of Binghamton, is an artist who incorporates poetic text into works of visual art. Born and raised in Whitney Point, Warfield completed her bachelor’s degrees in fine arts and communications at Cornell University. After graduation, she worked in multiple positions at the Broome County Arts Council before creating her own business, Anna Warfield Art, LLC. Her business has allowed her to pursue her art while taking up other creative contracts, such as LUMA Projection Arts Festival.
Warfield said she began to focus on the written word early in her artistic career, and chose to attend Cornell University specifically to enter a program that would let her pursue both communications and fine arts. She said the cultural back-and-forth between Whitney Point and the fine arts world encouraged her to make multilayered art that could be appreciated in both spaces.
“This stems all the way back to undergrad for me,” she said. “Working in a fine arts space, finding ways to be as clear in what I’m trying to communicate as possible was important to me, and I think that’s partly because of my background.”
At Cornell University, she got involved in book arts, which counterintuitively involved little text and lots of line work, until making the transition into soft sculpture with fabric books and other objects. One of her early soft sculpture pieces, a cornhole board that reads “Touch Me” with beanbags that look like women’s midriffs, addresses sex and misogyny in relation to college party culture. Continuing in the thematic realm of sex and gender, Warfield later closed in on a specific style involving stitched and stuffed lines of text.
Warfield said her poetic voice, which she used in writing artist statements, developed concurrently with her sculptural vision.
“I’m constantly thinking through the most concise way to capture a feeling, an emotion or something that maybe I’ve experienced and parsing that down to the exact right words for what I’m trying to say,” she said.
She said the journey of marrying words with sculpture has allowed audiences an insight into the creative process itself.
“Stepping into the writing was me deciding that I wanted to take ownership of my voice, but I also wanted people to sit with the writing for a long time like I was doing,” she said. “My meditative experience at my sewing machine with these words for a long duration of time was what I wanted to impose on other people as well.”
Warfield said her process begins as poetry writing before moving into aesthetic structuring, wherein structure matters as much as the text itself. Her “Soft Thorn” series arranges phrases like “Speak from the back of your eyes” into readable columns, one word per line.
“The language in those pieces relates to the female in her position, and her body in this weird, sexualized kind of way, and ownership, so the language is very command-oriented,” she said.
In contrast, Warfield’s “All Things Being Blue” series sees words running into each other as part of one horizontal line. She said this format is meant to physically engage audiences, forcing viewers to turn their heads to read a long stretch of text.
“[‘All Things Being Blue’] explores the way men talk to women and reduces that into something without giving them ownership of it,” she said. “It’s less referential on the female, more referencing the actions made toward her.”
Warfield’s “Ten Commands” series, consisting of sexual commands meant to parallel the Ten Commandments, similarly uses visual tricks to influence viewers’ interactions with the text. The letters on each two-dimensional piece are stitched from striped fabric and set against a backdrop of the same fabric turned 90 degrees so the lines are pointed in the opposite direction.
“It kind of creates a reverberance, so from afar you don’t see it reading as anything, but up close it has these very explicit commands,” Warfield said.
Warfield also aims to make connections between material and content in her art; for example, the “Ten Commands” series is made of fabric rejected from a church garment-making project. As the words in “All Things Being Blue” are entirely blue, “Soft Thorn” features varying shades of pink, and Warfield says she chose both colors with their gendered implications in mind. She said the “Soft Thorn” series was in part inspired by soft teachable objects, like the plush Bible books of her childhood that were both comforting and weighty.
“When making these pieces I was thinking about the structure being a soft, sort of approachable, squishy fluffy thing that’s lighthearted, but then what I’m talking about is often quite explicit and referential to sex and the female body,” she said.
The style and content of Warfield’s pieces are also inextricably linked by associations of textile work with domesticity. Warfield said she came into college wanting to make quilted portraits but was dissuaded from that pursuit under the pretense that it wasn’t fine art. In her upper-level courses, when it came time to choose her medium of focus, she stepped back into working with fabric.
“It was really expensive to be a painter, and I come from a low-income background, so I found myself working with things I had access to,” she said. “My mom was an industrial embroiderer and my dad did industrial screen printing, so I had access to those tools, and they were familiar.”
Coming off a show at Corning’s Evelyn Peeler Peacock Gallery, Warfield said she believes her text pieces have succeeded in spreading messages because of their relatability. As she moves forward in her career, she said she hopes to continue challenging the assumption that textile work and fine art are mutually exclusive labels.
“I definitely embrace it as something that’s gendered as feminine but I try to push back at it like, ‘Why is it something that doesn’t deserve this space?’” she said. “‘I can work in fiber and I can use the color pink and it doesn’t mean that it’s lesser than something else.”
“All Things Being Blue,” Warfield’s upcoming series, is scheduled to open June 5 at the Schweinfurth Art Center in Auburn, New York.