Craig Calderwood
Emotional Support, Hornet’s Nest, 2022
Upholstery fabric, acrylic paint, dimensional paint, pen, glazed ceramic, wood tapestry clamps, and resin
Private collection. Courtesy George Adams Gallery, New York.
San Francisco-based artist Craig Calderwood frequently utilizes “low-end” materials, like fabric paint, polymer clay, found fabrics, and fiber tip pens. Calderwood’s work shapeshifts among the material ideologies of painting, drawing, and textiles, to form images whose lines and textures teeter between thread and paint.
The fabric background of Emotional Support, Hornet’s Nest is composed of twelve individual squares of canvas stitched together; it is supported on the wall by handmade ceramic clips glazed in deep red. The central figure leans on a three-tiered rolling utility cart. Their face is composed entirely of flowers, and their eyes bloom as giant blue pansies. Pansies can symbolize nostalgia and compassion, but the word has also been deployed as a slur for LGBTQIA+ individuals.
The artist says of the work, “This piece is about the incongruous experience of being an essential worker while having a sense of self preservation during the first two years of Covid. Or the unwillingness to martyr myself for business, and to find essential comforts while stuck in the structure of business. The piece is a breakup text, a love letter, some fearful scribblings on a post-it. It’s a piece I made in retaliation to feeling Sacrificial.”
Photos courtesy of Henrik Kam.
ARTIST BIO
A self-taught artist, Craig Calderwood’s intricate and decorative works are rendered through a personal vernacular of symbols and patterns. Recalling the private languages that underground communities of queer and trans people used for safety for decades, Calderwood develops these patterns and symbols through research into history, personal narratives, and pop cultural moments. They then arrange them into constellations to tell stories both personal and fantasized.
