Andee Hess

Artist Andee Hess has forged an impressive career in Interior Design, after an early start in welding, metal furniture design and fabrication. Her work in designing environments has always prioritized collaboration with artisans and craftspeople to enhance spaces with a layer of discovery and concerted attention to materiality and origin.

 

Craving to work with her hands again, the opportunity to create Lumen Reliquary presented itself. Rather than engaging others solely to fabricate the experience, Hess dove into conceptual development with the desire to carve and sculpt the wood elements herself.

 

Hess foraged for material in the forests near her home in the Pacific Northwest, ultimately selecting discarded walnut trunks from a sawmill in Aurora, Oregon where she worked alongside the sawyer to mill the final pieces and transport them to her studio. Weeks of sanding and sculpting ensued, as a language and pattern of interuptions in the wood evolved. Imagined as a simplified technology which is either ancient or highly advanced, alluding to interfaces from vintage sci-fi and retro-futurism, this sculpture represents a manipulated network for unknown functionality.  Hovering above the sculpture are suspended mirror ribs which evoke a forest canopy and sacred enclosure, abstracting the reflection we engage and project upon experiences in nature.

 

In conjunction with Jacqueline Surdell’s The Conversion: Rings, Rupture, and the Forest Archive and concurrent survey exhibition Natura Non Constristatur, Hess transformed the Salon space at SECRIST | BEACH. See images of  Lumen Reliquary below and visit the Natura Non Contristatur exhibition page for more information.