CORNER STORE COLUMN

THE LINEAGE OF SHARED SPACES

An Interview with Lia Huntington

by Francesca Valsania

Lia Huntington is a multimedia artist based in Philadelphia with a focus in metal, fiber, photography and collage. She’s the owner and founder of Brick & Wire, a beautiful line of jewelry and photography prints. Her art speaks to the relationship between people and their environment. Her sculptural work and jewelry incorporate found materials from public spaces and industrial sites that capture a point in time and a piece of that particular history. She combines elements of collage and textiles, while weaving in qualities of photographic imagery.

Francesca: I love the way you integrate all these processes using industrial and found materials. And you're working with metal but are still keeping that creativity. Like in your Wall and Bee Balm pieces that incorporate photographs of physical places but then are sort of fragmented and freely moving. Is that part of your interest in transforming places or in the way we experience our surroundings? You mentioned in your artist statement sort of a shared or collective experience that we all have in certain places and was wondering if it was connected to that grounded feeling or sense you get in working with metals?

Lia: Definitely. I find that the repetition of going to spaces and being in spaces is very grounding. Finding the details, honing in on details in places and having the space to think is part of it. Where things aren't super busy or bustling and so you can sit or walk, or just kind of be in a space. That's a really grounding thing for me. It's also how spaces build a resonance. It's like with the materials for me, how they’re a kind of interaction and collaboration. Spaces can be like that too. An interaction. And I love how you can feel connections through the structures that are there, what was there before and what's not there now. I feel it's another grounding part of my life. Going on walks through places or just appreciating, even on drives and commutes, how you move through these same landscapes over and over repeatedly, depending on what your routines are. I've lived in a lot of different places. I lived in Western Mass, Indiana, Kentucky, and then Philadelphia.

Francesca: So you’ve experienced a lot of sort of changing environments, but also some things that remain the same?

Lia: Yeah. I've been in Philly now for around 13 years, and have had a lot of different jobs here and in the suburbs. So I think about the way that your patterns kind of shape how you move through space, and those things, those views that fill up your routines, and how everybody is doing that simultaneously around each other. We all have our commutes to work and our favorite places to go sit, and I like that.

Francesca: That’s a really interesting relationship between the sensory experiences or memories we associate with certain places, but that we all might experience differently..

Lia: Yeah, but there are shared elements of them. So it's a kind of network or web. Pieces of the same thing. Like everybody going up 95 goes past the same parts of the highway and sees little glimpses of the river.

Francesca: There’s something reassuring about that.

Lia: That's kind of what I think a big part of what my art practice right now is about. It’s grabbing little glimpses of that and trying to use them, show them and share them. Partly because it just… it gives me a way to keep having that experience or just amplify the experience, I guess, for myself.

“I like how you can feel connections through the structures that are there, what was there before and what's not there now.” 

Francesca: You mentioned the tie between past and present and this chronology in your work that was striking. Are there like certain moments that come to mind for you personally that connect with the places you express in your work?

Lia: They're different. Some places in the photos are places I’ve been to a lot, so they're not a specific one experience. They're just tied to that place. And other places, you know, I'll go on a walk there every so often. So some of the photographic imagery is very tied to one memory or one experience, and then others it's just the collective memory of that space that I go to. I also started collecting, because I started doing my jewelry work with the brick around 2016.

Francesca: Your brickwork series?

Lia: Yeah, I actually have to update my website because I changed the title to Textural Lineage once I got the most recent piece done. But yeah, it's that series…

So that's why I changed the title. Because it's kind of all about that. The textures and the lineage of shared spaces, so that kind of thing. But when I started doing that series, I also started being more deliberate about when I collect little objects, like dating them and keeping track of and noting where they came from, which I was doing a little bit before then. So I have lots of little tiny boxes of little bricks from certain places.

… I did a series of little tiny brick earring studs that I kept the exact date and time and place where I got them, and put them on the back.

Francesca: That's such a unique kind of experience cause in a sense what you're wearing or bringing and carrying around with you is the physical place?

Lia: Yes, literally. It was neat to have people buy those three little stud earring sets, because it felt like, you're taking this from my history, you know? The thing that I had this interaction with once five years ago, then they're taking it and now it's theirs, and they're carrying that little piece of fourth and Tasker with them.

“…You're taking this from my history, you know? The thing that I had this interaction with once five years ago, then they're taking it, and now it's theirs.” 

Francesca: There's a humorous element..

Lia: Yeah, I was thinking a lot about value too, or kind of how value and preciousness.. how those concepts work. Because as I was working, what’s that word, provenance. I thought, there's a provenance for these bricks of exactly where they came from, so their accountability, data collection and value, and that kind of thing. As I was working, especially on the brick jewelry pieces, it was pretty painstaking work. I learned a lot through doing that series and developed a lot of skills through it. They were all very labor intensive like smithing and metalsmithing skills. It's working with these bricks that could, if you dropped them, they could crumble.

Francesca: Would you say that's part of the charm of working with it or is it just more difficult of a material?

Lia: Yes, and speaking of humor, kind of calling into question I think there's some humor maybe, in putting so much work and attention into something that's just usually on the sidewalk. It's humor but also earnest too, because I really do value them and they really do take on this treasure feeling. Especially once you put six hours into sanding this brass to make it really shiny… If the brick breaks then you have to adjust the whole frame that you made into something else. Some other random shape. So I really liked how it felt like the material, from the attention, gained value at least. At least to me.

Francesca: Wow, these are beautiful. I just got the images of your necklace. It does feel like a very sculptural piece, like a textile too.

Lia: Yeah, that was my 2020 art project, it was making that neck piece which, again, was so labor intensive, but wasn't really a practical project to do again. But I’m really happy with how it came out and how it looks. It was a really special project. It was part of when I had the residency at DaVinci Art Alliance in 2022. That's when I made them the armature, so they all had little brass stands I made and they were all mounted on the wall through the gallery on the second floor. And then the square papers were all around on the walls in there, and I made these paper and mixed media sculptures that

Lia Huntington’s work is available to purchase through our Flat File. Take a look!

If you have questions about dvaa’s SHOP, please direct them to our ProGRAMMING COORDINATOR at saramae@davinciartalliance.org

Francesca Valsania is a mixed media artist with a focus in Cyanotype, Sculpture and Furniture Design. Currently in her senior year at Bennington College, she is an Architecture Studio assistant and has apprenticed with acclaimed installation artists’ Steven and William Ladd on beaded textiles and fabric scroll landscapes. She is working on her senior project creating cyanotypes that reference frescos from The Villa of The Mysteries.