By Miles Hilton
Westfield-based artist Audrey Dowling, though raised in Jamestown, had to rediscover the region after moving to the Hudson Valley to teach as a young adult. “We did the ‘back to the land’ thing,” she says, purchasing 80 acres and moving her young family to the area. That was when, says Dowling, “I started my career as an artist.”
Next Friday, August 23, the Octagon Gallery in Westfield will host the opening reception of the exhibit “Retrospective – A Rural Artist’s Journey”, a panoramic view of Dowling’s work over the past fifty years. The exhibit will run until September 13, and can be viewed during the Patterson Library’s normal opening hours.
As a young artist, “it was pretty much felt that you were in New York City, or you weren’t going to do art,” Dowling recollects. Upon moving back to the area, Dowling “realized there was no place locally for artists to show their work,” as well as a pervasive attitude that there was no market for art in Western New York. She began dreaming of “a gallery where [she could] feature regional work year-round,” and in 1983 Portage Hill Art Gallery opened at it’s current location in Westfield, New York.
Dowling is a mixed-media artist, working in mediums as diverse as painting, ceramics, and fiber. Over the course of her career, even the materials she’s used have been influenced by her choice to live rurally. When she first moved to the region she lived in a cabin without electricity or running water, constraints that “limited what mediums [she] could work on,” and led her to focus on two-dimensional media, including stitched and quilted art. Over the years, as she’s benefited from modern plumbing, she’s created a clay studio and printmaking studio to support her work.
Of the evolution of her work over the past fifty years, Dowling says, “Over time I have come to trust myself more, trust my instincts more as an artist. And I’ve always sort of played in and out of abstraction, but I am feeling more comfortable now doing pieces that are just abstract. I think over time I’m becoming more narrative in my work.”
Many of the pieces in the retrospective are paintings inspired by nature, with Dowling confirms as an ongoing inspiration. Some are figurative, some abstract, many a mixture of the two, and most make vibrant use of color and texture. “I love texture and use it,” Dowling reflects, “so it’s not surprising that both clay and printmaking would galvanize me”.
Dowling is prolific – “the more marks you make on paper, the better you get at it,” she laughs – and quick to mention her numerous awards, grants, and features in art magazines. “One of my goals” in putting on the retrospective, Dowling says, “is to convey to people that you can live out here in the boonies and still get some recognition. I want to encourage artists to go for it. Yeah, it’ll be harder. You’ll have to spend more time on the internet looking for opportunities,” but the payoff, for Dowling, is well worth it.
As part of the exhibition at the Octagon Gallery, Dowling will give a talk on “how you can use art to build a community and be a tourism driver,” which she hopes not only “art people” but “people that do economic development” will be interested in attending. ‘Art as an economic driver’, while often effective, is also generally seen as one of the first steps in gentrification, the process whereby wealthy newcomers move to a previously affordable area, gradually pricing longtime residents out of their homes and communities. As Chautauqua County becomes more artistically active, this is a tension that all of us artists in the area will need to grapple with.
Dowling’s local roots, commercial success, and decades of experience building her own career and artistic communities in the county, place her at the center of this difficult conversation. Showcasing her life and career as an example of what is possible in rural areas seems to be at least as important to her as displaying her work itself; after all, the two have been inseparable.