For nearly 50 years, DC-area artist Betsy Packard has transformed the substances enveloping her life into art. She has made paintings from dryer lint; sewn tapestries with used clothes and hair clippings; and cast plaster sculptures from food cartons, wine bottles, and children’s toys. One might be tempted to describe her work as diaristic, if it wasn’t for knowing nods to the history of art: constructivism. Surrealism, Pop Art, Nouveau Realism, Fluxus, Feminist Art, and more.
Triple Candie identifies with many aspects of her work. We respect her frugality and resourcefulness. We love how she makes the commonplace strange. If we had a larger space, we’d celebrate her career with a long-overdue retrospective—a seven-course meal, if you will. What we offer instead is merely an amuse-bouche—a mere taste, works ranging from the 1980s to the present. Please take a little time to savor and digest her unique vision.
Though the works in the exhibition could be studied anthropologically as artifacts of Betsy Packard’s life—a painting that records her casting of the I-ching; tip envelopes and hair samples from her time as a hair dresser; napkins collected as a waitress, processed and cast into the shape of a loaf of bread; her child’s baby teeth replacing the clock face of a wrist watch—the motivations of her artistic practice are not solely autobiographical.
The specific personal stories embedded in her materials may be more or less apparent to the viewer, more or less forgotten by the maker, but nevertheless inform Packard’s visual language—an aesthetic that values the humble, the mundane, and the intimate. Old clothing bearing the owner’s memory has been transformed to reveal the flat shapes of its construction. Egg cartons and plastic product packaging have been used as molds for casting cement and plaster. In lieu of more traditional materials such as paint or stone, Packard uses these quotidian keepsakes and detritus equally to play with form, shape, color, and texture.
The works in this exhibition, the earliest from 1978 (.1315 Bread), the most recent made this year (.1356 untitled), stem from a lifetime of carefully noting the possibilities of our everyday material surroundings. Consistent across the work is a conscious and emphatic thriftiness and a grittiness of both content and surface that rejects the common obsession with sleek, shiny, and new in our consumer culture; instead, Packard rejoices in materials that show permeability and wear, and attest to the ephemerality of our lives.
-Hannah Barco, Curator
.0486 Mural 2015 80″x 50″. used clothing and felt, handsewn
.1145 Your Baby Teeth. 1980s-90s. teeth in watch. .0773 Bust of Oliver Wendell Holmes. date unknown. plaster, rocks, paint.
above: work by Thomas Doyle, Betsy Packard, and Jiazi Yin in “Blue,” at King Street Gallery, Montgomery College.
The following featured works are mine. They are of varied dates (1982 to 2023), sizes (98″x36″ is the largest), and materials (everyday and abundant-as well as saved, treasured ones). I’ve returned to used clothing as the primary. Mine is a green, slow art- right now more than ever-where conservation of resources is a priority.
From my installation in the exhibition, “Louisiana Environments,” at the Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans, LA, 1977. Mended wall, saved objects in wall, found glass wall piece, studio coal from a wood firing of clay.
See other posts from this installation: 0195 and .0196 in the category 1977
Betsy Packard Art Archive 