Loren Schwerd:
Mourning Portrait
Loren Schwerd is a sculptor and mixed media artist who is currently an Assistant Professor of Sculpture at Louisiana State University. She received her BFA in Studio Arts from Tulane University, New Orleans, LA, and her MFA in Sculpture from Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY. She was a longtime instructor/visiting professor at the College of Charleston (1999-2005) and contributed much to the visual arts in South Carolina. Schwerd has been in many solo and group exhibitions including Either Side of the Skin, Penland Gallery School of Crafts, Penland, NC, 2008, 60 Seconds of Play, Traveling Exhibition, Sarai Media Lab, India, Tilt Gallery and Project Space Portland Oregon, Forum Gallery, Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, MI, Saltworks Gallery, Atlanta, GA, 2006, Homegrown: Southeast, Southeastern Contemporary Art Center, Winston-Salem, NC, 2005, and Thresholds: Expressions of Art and Spirituality, (traveling exhibition of five Southern states, Florida, Tennessee, Kentucky NC, and SC) curated by Eleanor Heartney. She was recently invited to exhibit her Mourning Portrait pieces in Prospect. 1, New Orleans.
Mourning Portrait began as a series of memorials to the communities of New Orleans that were devastated by the flooding which followed Hurricane Katrina. These commemorative objects are made from human hair extensions of the type commonly used by African-American women that the artist found outside The St Claude Beauty Supply. The portraits draw on the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century tradition of hairwork, in which family members or artisans would fashion the hair of the deceased into intricate jewelry and other objects as symbols of death and rebirth. Working from her own photographs, Schwerd creates metal armatures that act as frameworks for weaving the hair into portraits of the vacant houses of the Ninth Ward neighborhood. By documenting private homes Schwerd venerates the city’s losses, both individual and collective. Hair acts as the central metaphor to evoke a sense of profound intimacy and absence, and speaks to the racial politics that have paralyzed the city’s recovery effort.
In the year and a half that Schwerd has been researching and executing this work, the series has expanded into a larger exhibition of objects and images that utilize a broader range of techniques and provides a richer context for the original dwellings. Trees, flowers, and other forms shaped from found wigs, combine imagery from Victorian hair wreaths with contemporary, sculptural, African-American hair fashions.