JILL BAROFF

CREATIVE STATEMENT

The edge of the land-based world, along with the winds, weather, and movement of the celestial universe combine to create wave and water level patterns. The changes in height between the ebb and flow of the sea result in distinctive patterns of place. Over time, I have become increasingly interested in the disruption of these patterns caused by storms and other forms of extreme weather.

One such project came about with an invitation by the Hamburger Kunsthalle in Hamburg, Germany, to create a series of drawings of the city’s great harbor. The resulting suite of drawings document the winter storm Xaver as it surged through the North Sea and the Elbe River. A more recent project focuses on extreme weather in the Gulf of Mexico, documenting hurricanes Ida, Laura, Nicholas and Zeta and their devastating storm surges. Drawn by hand on Japanese gampi, the drawings are made with ink on the tissue-thin paper and are then mounted onto a watercolor base paper. During the mounting process, the drawing is suspended in a water bath before being lifted out onto the support, affording a brief interaction of the elements and a moment that allows the drawing to move, creating micro shifts in the linear pattern. ‘Despite what at first seems like such technical precision, these sheets … prove to be eventful, visually lively pictorial spaces situated in a fundamentally charged push and pull between difference and repetition, momentary singularity and permanence,’ writes Jens Peter Koerver in the catalogue for the Essen exhibition Zeichnung als Prozess (Drawing as Process) at Museum Folkwang in 2008.

The didactic nature of data does not interest me so much as its persuasive aloofness and the fact that it provides a structure that allows for less decision-making on my part and more freedom in making a drawing. The data simply provides an over-arching pattern of something that I cannot see with my eyes, but understand to be true. That said, precise, verified, data has become increasingly available over the twenty years I have been making these drawings. Initially, in many locations I was limited to predicted high and low tides with little chance to observe detailed, historical data. This has dramatically changed with the warming of the planet and scientists’ need to track dangerous storms. On both coasts of the United States stations now provide data recorded at 1-minute intervals. As an artist, I am not so interested in a fixed conclusion but in a series of questions that open up another series of questions. Over and over information gives up new visual interpretations of changing seas over time.

BIOGRAPHY

Jill Baroff was born in 1954 in Summit, NJ. She received her BFA from Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio in 1976, participated in the Artist Seminars Program at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York in 1978, and pursued post-graduate studies at Hunter College, The City University of New York from 1980 to 1981. She studied and lived in Japan as part of the Japan-US Friendship Commission’s Creative Artists exchange program in 1996 and was a visiting artist at the Awagami Factory, Tokushima, Japan in 1998.

Baroff has been awarded grants and fellowships from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, New York (1987, 1993); The MacDowell Colony, Peterborough, New Hampshire (1988, 1990); the National Endowment for the Arts, Washington, D.C. (1994, 1996); the New York Foundation for the Arts (1995, 2009); the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation, New York (2007); and the Field Institute Hombroich, Neuss, Germany (2008, 2010, 2011). Her most recent solo exhibitions were held at Galerie Christian Lethert, Cologne (2020); and Bartha Contemporary, London (2022). Her work has recently been included in group shows at the The Museum of Craft and Design in San Francisco (2021), Museum Folkwang, Essen, Germany (2020) and Mies van der Rohe Haus, Berlin (2019). Her work is included in numerous public collections, including The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, The Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University Art Museums, Cambridge, MA, The Menil Collection, Houston, TX, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., Staedel Museum, Frankfurt, Germany, Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, Stuttgart, Germany, Yale University Art Museum, New Haven, CT and the Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, MD. Baroff lives and works New York.

All images and text shown courtesy of the artist.