“A Textual Sense” – Sophia Valdez
Although many of the pieces in the series Empty Feast are based on woven and layered objects, a consistent thread throughout von Hartmann’s body of work is the strength of the written word. When most creative minds think of the power of the written word or text, they think of poetry, epics, and the classics. None of these themes apply to von Hartmann’s work, however, because she sees words for what they are rather than what they mean; that is to say, von Hartmann values words as shapes. Words are simply lines and dots, dashes and curves, and when viewed in an abstract way, a wall of text can become a graceful patterned backdrop for drawings, found objects, and pressed flora. The ability to transform pages of text into tangible objects was born from von Hartmann’s struggles with the physical word throughout her life. For von Hartmann, dyslexia caused the written word to carry a feeling of loss and found. Text not only represented a frustration of expression to von Hartmann, but also came to embody the modern world’s shift towards a non-verbal society that feeds off of diminutive pieces of information. The remedy to this ubiquitous loss of knowledge and communication was to preserve the text, the very text that is often frustrating, now preserved through weaving and layering. In von Hartmann’s work, the shapes on a page that we recognize as words change from intellectual tools to physical ones.
A word-laden bowl delicately cradles rolls of bandages. The viewer is left to decide if the rolls have become unusable or are offerings to suffering. A woven mat provides a resting place for a tattered, emptied book. Intertwined lines of stories and doctrines are coiled tightly around each other, rolled up for safekeeping, each word shielding and being shielded by another. It is evident throughout von Hartmann’s work that words were never meant to convey meaning in a textual sense, but rather a physical one. Spoken word is lost, written word is meaningless, but woven word creates new layers of tenderness, anxiety, and human connection that the aforementioned texts could never achieve in such a powerfully physical sense.
– Sophia Valdez – Art Journalist, Freelance Editor