Providence-based artists Michele L’Heureux, Amy Wynne and Jonathan Derry together are showing 25 sculptures, drawing/installations and hybrid 2D & 3D works in “No Mud, No Lotus,” on view through October 12 at the Narrows Center for the Arts in Fall River, Massachusetts. Their works, produced in alliance with the artists’ shared Buddhist mindfulness practices, explore and encompass the pain of personal loss. They are intense, intimate and poignant.
L’Heureux, also the curator, is a former director and curator of galleries at Brandeis University, Montserrat College of Art and Wheaton College. L’Heureux had been slogging alone through the “mud” of terminating a 20-year marriage a year ago when she invited Wynne and Derry to join her in a weekly studio dialogue to develop and refine works to be included. The title quotes Vietnamese monk and peace activist Thich Nhat Hanh on the suffering that precedes creative regeneration. Authenticity has been their touchstone, derived through a meditative practice that accepts the presence and transitory nature of difficult feelings without passing judgment. The works on view may be subtle, bizarre or over-the-top, yet none sentimentalizes or denies the facts of pain and grief.
Painter Wynne, who for years has taught meditation, landscape painting and creative process, discovered, through mindfulness, ways of integrating repetitive rituals and daily disciplines around loss into her art.
Derry, after losing several family members shortly before the exhibition, found room to accept the possibility that aggressive, even destructive emotions might re-infuse his sculptures with positive energy.
L’Heureux was able to tolerate the grief in recalling happier days while reclaiming “failed” prints, drawings and materials for new purposes.