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Module/Mass (detail), 1984, etching on paper, Peg Fierke |
Troy Wasn't Built in a Day
Maybe there is likely a natural evolution of a creative spirit, a maturation, that arrives around the time of mid-career. When the first experiments are over but their lessons have been learned. By which time accolades and innovation are accepted as a part of the process as opposed to means to an end.
As the 1970s were ending, with the next decade on the horizon, the art of Peg Fierke would begin a transition away from a vantage point of a surreal observation, an almost clinical depiction of the quirks and qualms of life, toward a viewpoint less apart and looking, and more at one with and being.
Ideas of cross-hatching and the many steps of a marathon, and of personal life, would come more to the forefront of her thinking and appear in her artworks.
Fierke's first inklings of this change are noted by writer Marion Garmel in her review of Fierke's new work exhibited at a 2-person show, along with Robert Eagerton, at Herron Gallery in 1977.
In her November 9, Indianapolis News column, the writer observes,
“Miss Fierke('s)...etchings, colored-pencil and ink drawings, and one large oil are filled with organic, vegetable-like forms in surreal juxtaposition.”
Garmel is describing in this line just a portion of Fierke's works in the show, works that emphasize earlier directions. The writer also notes a new direction for Fierke, in many other pieces,
“Most recently, the artist has moved into color(,) and a kind of wispy, coloring book style dominates her drawings. There is little of the old geometry from which she once constructed three-dimensional environments based on her drawings, but there is a great sense of motion in these new works.”
Over the following couple of years, Fierke would be involved in numerous activities, both art and otherwise, as noted in the local newspapers.
In 1978 , she would participate in a Herron Gallery theme show called Chairs.
Cursory newspaper coverage of the event advised readers that the show of artworks was by Herron students and faculty. The only artist mentioned by name in a February 25 blurb was Fierke, about whom was written “...some marvelous prints by Peg Fierke in which chairs float in space, straddle each other and serve as hanging lines for underwear and seats for grass.”
Related to her life outside of art, Fierke was a volunteer and member in various outings for the Central Indiana Bicycling Association around that time.
Fierke would participate in Roadshow '79 the following year, in what is described in the Indianapolis Star, on July 15, as an exhibit “of works on 40 billboards throughout Marion County sponsored by the Indianapolis Art League.”
That same summer, Fierke would be in the group show of local, national and international artists at Indianapolis Museum of Art, called Contemporary Prints and Drawings by Contemporary Women. The other local women also included were Samia Halaby, who studied at Indiana University at Bloomington, and Martha Slaymaker, a former Indianapolis resident then living in Albuquerque, NM. The more widely-known participants included Alice Neel and Helen Frankenthaler.
Fierke would cap off the '70s, and perhaps an era of her earlier style, with two important shows in the 1980; a smelly opus of a surreal swan song first, and then the show at the dawn of her new and percussive age of many marks.
Starting with the first show, in February of 1980, as part of the annual Herron faculty exhibit, Fierke presented her installation/sculpture, Waitin' On Summer.
I have already covered this artwork, and Marion Garmel's impressions of this thoroughly post-modern Fierke in the prior piece about Steve Mannheimer here.
But for purposes of understanding this period in Fierke's career, and her art influences at the time, a second look at Garmel's column is helpful. It quotes Fierke, in her own words,
“Sometimes art seems irrelevant to the rest of your life. I was thinking of the recent Joseph Beuys exhibit in New York. It was so strong because his life is so much a part of his art. It seems important to make other things important to me part of my art.”
Garmel further writes, explaining,
“Miss Fierke is an avid gardener and various parts of Waitin' On Summer had hung in her backyard since they were first exhibited, in an entirely different manner, at Editions Ltd. Gallery. The seed box, for example once hung from the ceiling and had giant seed pods attached to it. Later it sat in a dead tree in Miss Fierke's backyard, as pictured in a photograph that accompanies the piece.”
Garmel again quotes the artist,
“It has deteriorated greatly since and that is part of the idea of the piece. The generative notion, of life and growing organic matter. Time goes on. Things change.”
By that November, in a show of pen and ink drawings, it seems Fierke's time had come for things to change. Marion Garmel, always aware of Fierke's exhibitions and vigilant in covering her career arc, devoted a column of Brush Strokes to the show.
Held at the Jewish Community Center in Indianapolis, the exhibition was reviewed in the November 1, 1980, Indianapolis News. The column opens with the line, “No one can accuse Margaret “Peg” Fierke of standing still.”
Garmel goes on describe Fierke's award winning days, reputation and past work, from Grass in 1972 to the most recent Waitin' On Summer, from earlier that year. Garmel then describes a change,
“Now Miss Fierke has taken a new turn. Peg Fierke: Recent Works...is an intriguing show of pen and ink drawings and paintings in which surrealist space and displacement of objects no longer plays any part.
Indeed, the drawings and paintings all seem to tell little stories in images derived from the artist's current concerns – jogging, bicycling and gardening. More interesting yet, perspective and attempts to create illusion of three-dimensional space have disappeared. All the works are surface pieces, done with a cover of cross-hatched lines that make the images appear to pop out and recede from behind a theatrical scrim.”
Garmel then quotes Fierke directly, from remarks the artist gave at the show's opening,
“In school you are always taught the most contemporary ways of printmaking...But I would go up to the Art Institute (in Chicago) and look at the old prints and love the things the old artists did, the crosshatching, the patterns formed. By manipulating the direction of the stroke you could bring out different things. It's a nice way to get transparencies.
Then I found I could get the same effects of obscuring and transparency with color.”
Garmel continues her own observations, in response to Fierke's comments about technique,
“(Fierke) has always been more a technician than a storyteller. Yet the works in this show are almost little autobiographies. It is easy to see what the artist's life is like. She's a dog owner, likes farms and farm animals, runs, bicycles and loves to garden.
There is a even marriage between life and art in the way these new works are constructed.”
And along those lines, she quotes Fierke again,
“I think the meticulous mark-making is a lot like running a marathon. The careful buildup, the training – one step at a time, one day at a time. When you run a marathon you don't run 26 miles at once, you run one step at a time.”
In December, some of the same works were shown at Herron and reviewed by Elizabeth Willis-Sowards in Arts Insight magazine. Willis-Sowards also describes the autobiographical nature of many of Fierke's latest images, such as of “the artist's dog, Otto, and wooden protective structures from her garden.”
She further describes the effects of Fierke's new techniques,
“Space and perspective are...multifaceted and complex in Fierke's works. Subtle layers of transparent space , as found in The Wrench or the Troy Bilt painting, juxtapose in the exhibit with drawings like Otto's House which seems to have countless vanishing points, yet remains cohesive.”
Mid-career Milestone.
The 1980s would bring recurring Herron faculty exhibits every couple of years to showcase Peg Fierke's developing mark making.
In 1981, her Line of Scrimmage series, a suite of pieces, is described by Garmel in The News as
“a line of hair-width pencil marks snakes like an S, circles like an O and divides like a zipper in 15 panels.”
Following the progression, in an October 14, 1983, review of the then current Herron faculty show, Garmel describes Fierke's work that year,
“Peg Fierke, who in the past has gone from crisp, linear surrealistic graphics to found-object sculptures, has changed again. Here she is showing heavily painted canvases where each dense stroke is like a feather on a bird.”
By 1985, Peg Fierke will be showing at the new 431 Gallery on Massachusetts Avenue, and it will be a new writer that will review her show. Marcus Chandler, writing in The Indianapolis Star on March 17, 1985, in a column headlined, Peg Fierke's repetitive patterns are hypnotic, begins the review, in part as follows,
“Peg Fierke is a paragon of compulsion. In her paintings, drawings and prints exhibited at the 431 Gallery...she ceaselessly repeats a single small form.
With the exception of just two drawings, all of her works are completely covered with elongated ellipses, each approximately the size and the shape of a guppy, each dotted with a dollop of color.
Schools of ellipses are arranged in some of the works as swirling abstract images and in others as recognizable shapes.”
(An etching on paper from this period, Module/Mass is on current display in the Peg Fierke retrospective exhibit in the Herron Galleries, Evidence of Things Unseen. The show also contains the engraved copper plate used to create that print - see image at top of page)
The writer discusses what he considers the particularly strong works in the show,
“The best paintings in Ms. Fierke's exhibit have a similar hypnotic power, such as On A Roll wherein the gentle flow of countless ellipses creates flower like images. The artist elegantly employs the essential ingredient of hypnosis: repeated suggestion.”
Marion Garmel would cover the same show in The Indianapolis News. In her column headlined A kaleidoscope of art appearing March 8, 1985, she writes,
“You might not think much could be made of a thin leaf shape in varying colors but Peg Fierke, in her recent paintings at the 431 Gallery ...would prove you wrong.
Miss Fierke...has been through a number of stags in her career, from the deftly surreal drawings that won her acclaim in the early 1970s to the organic “growing” constructions that she displayed in Herron faculty shows two years ago.
Now she has turned to painting and a virtuoso turn it is. Seventeen works, mostly paintings, are in her one woman show, all based on the same idea: an oval leaf form repeated hundreds of times across a canvas, sometimes with thick outlines, sometimes with paint-daubed bodies and sometimes with little eyes so that they look like swarms of fish.”
In the thoroughly descriptive and informative column, the writer discusses the chronology of the works, the gallery layout, and a few paintings in particular,
“...Fish Eyes, with its pink eyes in purple fish, looks like fish eyes before you read the tile. On A Roll, which sold at the opening for $1500, has a sunburst effect, in oranges and greens, like a hundred bird feathers proudly spread...
...by far the best is Constancy of Change, selling for $2000 and worth every penny of it. Here the leaf shapes are outlined in thick yellow with some white space in between, and, as the leaves touch and don't touch across the canvas, a wonderful organic pattern appears. It gives you the feeling of floating in space.”
That fall, Garmel would cover the Herron Faculty Biennial Exhibition in her News column on October 25, 1985. Fresh off her 431 Show, Fierke continues to deliver beautiful artwork, as the writer describes,
“Peg Fierke's The Blood of Others, in her current style of overall painting, is a large canvus full of eyes in which, at strategic points, the paint drips down like tears. It is one of the finest things she has ever done.”
If Fierke had been peddling her bike toward the top of a hill, perhaps she'd reached some sort of summit by that point. Or if peddling in the desert, some sort oasis or fountain had been found. One thing is clear, she had not strayed far or often, if ever at all, from her road of discovery.
A marathon route, although perhaps preset and known at the outset, is challenging by way of duration, through its pounding pavement. It presents its own kind of mystery – Will I make it? – in every one of its thousands of strides.
A bicycle ride on an Indiana country road presents adventure at every 90 degree turn. Sometimes the tidy scheme and utility of a farm layout with its fields and buildings, sometimes the shimmering oceans of leaves of growing corn in the wind. If not summer, the winter trees, and the bifurcation of naked branches, like river deltas reaching in the sky.
In Fierke's work the 431 Gallery Show in 1985, we see a mid-career change of route. A new path underfoot, fresh gravel for the bicycle wheels. Something new is growing in the garden, and we shall see something new in the rhythmic strata of Fierke's work to come, something of a wood-grain flow will come to fruition in Part Four.
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Photo of Peg Fierke in 1982, Indianapolis News |
Mark Diekhoff, July 2026
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