Art exhibit at Frame of Mind explores family tie

Family Ties.

Family Values.

Family Time.

Amanda Ladymon, a prolific visual artist, has been thinking about all of the above. It’s what happens when one embarks on starting a family of their own.

“All the way until I was 25 or 26, I didn’t want kids and didn’t think I’d ever want to kids,” said the 30-year-old Ladymon, who is fourth months pregnant. “I think it takes meeting the right person.”

The right person, in her case, is Eric Stockard, owner of S&S Art Supply, a Main Street store. Ladymon’s work has leaned on biological concepts and ideas, and her current show, “Kindred Harvest,” an exhibition of mixed media paintings on wood panel and paper at Frame of Mind, is a reflection of family.

Precisely, her own family. The photographs and drawings hovering in the mazes of drawn shapes are of her extended family and were taken from photo albums. The snaking drawings suggest, according to Ladymon’s artist statement, the connective energy between each person. The conceit flows through much of Ladymon’s work.

“I know this sounds very hippie-dippy, but I have this very strong belief that everything connects between all of us,” she said.

Emotionally, psychologically and scientifically. The conceptual meaning of the work, rendered in biomorphic and biological forms and terms, is a link to Ladymon’s biography. It might make the viewer think about their own history, how they are linked, reproductively, to the rest of the world.

“I put a whole lot of eggs in one basket,” Ladymon said. “I have so many ideas. It’s so hard to narrow down to one idea.”

Columbia is a connective place, specifically the arts community and particularly at events such as tonight’s First Thursday on Main, an evening where people can plug into the art scene.

“That’s something I love about living here,” said Ladymon, who moved to Columbia from Dallas at age 26 for USC’s MFA sculpture program. “And that’s something I never experienced before in my life.”

Some of Ladymon’s best-known work, like the vagina sculpture first hung at a “What’s Love” exhibition, has a feminist strand. There are images in “Kindred Harvest” that invoke reproductive organs. Her biological and feminist inspirations have met and, in a sense, formed a family.

“Holes in the Conversation,” a 70-foot-long pastel drawing on brown butcher paper, sparked controversy in 2010. The artwork of undulating, speech bubble shapes was exhibited in the Silver’s Building on Main Street — until it was shut down by a fire marshal.

“It was about getting conversation started,” said Ladymon, who will give a demonstration of her process during First Thursday. “That piece does relate to this show. Again, about the connectivity.”

Though Ladymon started making the works in the current show before she and Stockard, who married in April, knew they were having a child, she said that once she learned she was pregnant it fueled her artistic ideas. How has family affected the scale of her work?

“Something about bigger is better for me,” she said. “I’m actually a claustrophobic person. I don’t like small spaces. There’s something that happens to the viewer when you’re working on a scale larger than the viewer’s body. I hope it makes the viewer feel like they’re walking into this welcoming, odd place and experience.”

So does that mean she and Stockard are planning a large family?

“It’s funny you say that because my family is small,” Ladymon, an only child, responded. “I think we only want to have two. It would be neat to have a whole bunch, but I think we want to keep it small.”

Ladymon, who will teach art at USC, Augusta State University and Midlands Tech in the spring, foresees her art output slowing in the coming months because of her family.

“I know I won’t allow myself to disappear, but I just see it being really challenging to make lots of art like I have been,” she said.