Lesley Dill

Lesley Dill

Fellow: Awarded 2017
Field of Study: Fine Arts

Competition: US & Canada

“I am a word collector. I had an electrical experience reading a book of Emily Dickinson’s poetry given to me by my mother. As I turned the pages some phrases would jump into my eyes and fly down my throat like birds and in that place inside me, images for art making would be born. After 7 years, I was able to read other poets and the same process would happen. I now take these years of collected language and knit them together into something of a text smash and give them to the viewer like a gift. I am a matchmaker between word and image. And every sculpture or song or drawing- each one has to have its own skew of a linguistic attendant.”

Lesley Dill works in sculpture, photography, and performance using a variety of media and techniques to explore themes of text & language, the body, and transformational experience. Exploring the power of words to cloak and reveal the psyche, Dill invests new meaning in the human form. Intellectually and aesthetical engaging, the core of her work emerges from an essential, visionary awareness of the world.

Lesley Dill’s work is in the collections of the Albright Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, Cleveland Museum of Art, Kemper Museum in Kansas City, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, and Whitney Museum of American Art, among many others. Dill has been rewarded by many grants and awards including, The SGC International Lifetime Achievement in Printmaking Award, Center for Book Arts Honoree, Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant, New York Foundation for the Arts, Drawing – Printmaking Category, and New York State Council on Arts.
Lesley Dill lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

Photograph credit: George Woodman

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