Vibrating Boundaries

Martha Clippinger is Durham-based artist who creates colorful, abstract works that combine painting and sculpture. She often explores themes of a shared visual language and the importance of community in her work. These themes are highlighted by the large scale of this installation and its overlapping layers of color.

The vibrant colors and geometric patterns in this installation were inspired by artworks in the NCMA collection. These include traditional egúngún masquerade costumes from Nigeria that feature overlapping layers of fabric. Other works at the NCMA that influenced the artist’s design choices include 20th-century abstract paintings and handmade quilts from the American South.

The title of this work comes from a chapter in a book by artist Josef Albers. His 1963 book, Interaction of Color, explores color theory, perception, and experimentation. To create this installation, Clippinger drew from Albers’s ideas about color and the ways that colors interact with each other. This work is an example of an optical illusion known as simultaneous contrast. It works like this: when two complementary colors of similar brightness are placed side by side, one of the colors appears to be darker or lighter than the one beside it.

I’m interested in how formal relationships of color, shape, texture, and scale can both reflect and inform emotional states. As an abstract artist who works with geometric shapes and patterns, I’m drawn to motifs that span cultures, and I think about how such symbols can produce a universal or shared visual language.

Martha Clippinger