Sally Paul: Slits and Slots

About

Sally Paul’s lively grids are an unlikely marriage between geometric abstraction and craft. To create each work, paint is first squeezed, poured, dabbed, brushed and then cut-up, peeled, collaged, and finally woven as intimate, color-interactive compositions.  Paul’s playful process yields a gestural grid, complete with errant bubbles, droops, and implied motion that animates the paint as it moves over and under itself across the painting surface.

Paul counts her parallel career as a Museum educator as an influence. While leading tours and viewing 19th and 20th Century quilts, questions about the quilting process captured her imagination: Was there a significance to each chosen fabric? Did multiple people piece and stitch each quilt, or was it the work of a lone maker? What caused the maker to deviate from a pattern? The mysteries remain, but what is clear is that quilts are works of art that display artifacts of a life lived. In a similar way, Paul’s titles give subtle clues that stitch in references to personal experiences that may have inspired each work.