ABOUT THE ARTIST
Biography
Hilary Pfeifer is a craft-influenced sculptor who’s more often found scouring hardware stores for her materials rather than a traditional art supply store. Her work explores the natural world through sculpture, collage, and installation, often subtly incorporating found objects into her sculptures made from reclaimed wood and laser cut metal. Her recent collage work is made by hand-cutting hundreds of pieces of sign vinyl, shelf papers, sandpaper, or joint tape to create a dense composition.
STATEMENT
Until I grew up, I never understood why my mother would get angry when I used her fabric scissors for one of my many non-fabric projects. My attraction to collage has been lifelong, as well as my interest in combining unexpected materials together. As a young girl, the hours spent cutting magazines was a way to develop an appreciation of good design, culling the very best images from others for my own use.
An artist residency in Fiskars, Finland brought me to a new place with collage. While there, I used mixed media materials to explore landscape, a practice I continue to this day. Rather than the found images I gravitated towards in my youth, I now work with collage more abstractly. The use of color and choice of materials are combined to evoke the experience of not just seeing your surroundings, but feeling them, spending time there. The mark of the hand is important to me in all my artwork, and the act of meticulously cutting and then placing hundreds of tiny elements is my meditation.
While in Fiskars, I also acquired several precious cutting tools that are still my favorites for collage. I keep them hidden in their own bag, never to be used for anything else.
SPOTLIGHT ON THE ARTIST
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System Three makes a long-set epoxy called T-88. It is an amazing product that will basically glue anything to anything else if you use it right. A chip broke off of my favorite handmade bowl and I glued it back in with this epoxy and was able to run it through the dishwasher for another 2 years!
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I'm currently working on an installation that I started in spring of 2024 and will show next May - it's a project I started at an artist residency down in Sea View WA about how birds are increasingly including human detritus in their nests. I started making found object nests, and the coast was the perfect place to gather materials. My final installation will be 150 nests, to represent the number of bird species that will disappear in the next few decades if we don't do something to control carbon emissions. This project was featured on Oregon Public Broadcasting and has led to many speaking engagements and workshops, really transforming the way I work and engage the public in my ideas.
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One of Lee Bontecue's mobiles! Her career trajectory was so fascinating to me--part of the NY Art scene in the 60's/70's and then moved out of the city and stopped showing for decades, but kept on making art. Finally a curator tracked her down and she had this incredible body of work that almost nobody had seen, including a series of mobiles. It really made me think about making art without an audience.