A wasp nest sits on Sharon Havelka’s studio desk between a box of thread and a strip of red embroidered fabric. She lights a tea candle and hands me a slip of paper.
“Write something you really want or wish for, or something you just want to get rid of,” she tells me. I do as she says, and she rolls up my wish before wrapping it tightly in purple thread and putting a bit of melted candle wax on the end.
“Where do you want it to be?” she asks, gesturing to the wasp nest. A few of the nest’s holes are already filled with bundles of colorful thread, so I point to an empty pocket, into which she slides the rolled-up paper. All that’s left to the eye is a tiny bubble of purple thread, nestled among wishes of strangers at home in the holes of a wasp nest.
A similar wasp nest sits in Havelka’s show, “Salmon Skin Fried … and Other Delicacies,” on display at the Beverly + Sam Ross Gallery at Christian Brothers University. That nest used to reside above Havelka’s front door until it fell and all the wasps left it behind as if it were a hostess gift. “It reminded me of how a mailman leaves you a package,” she says. “It was just perfect, and I brought it inside.”
As an artist, Havelka knew she had to make use of the nest, but she says, “With anything that I find you can’t make it be something that it’s not. You have to listen to it. What does this want to be? It wants to fill up the holes with something. So then, what are your larvae? It’s gotta be something that can grow, something that can fly out and go out into the world.” And that’s where the written wishes came in. “The process has to be meaningful.”
That approach carries throughout her work, letting the materials dictate her process, even letting the materials come to her. For most of her recent work, Havelka gravitates towards quilting, a passion that blossomed while her three children were young. Before then, the graduate of the Memphis College of Art would draw and paint — “I was really into realism,” she says. That is, before she stumbled into woodworking and fell in love with the patterns she could make by cutting triangles or rearranging strips of wood.
With little kids around, though, woodworking wasn’t ideal, but Havelka needed to make something, anything, just as she always had ever since she herself was little and would get straight to drawing her hands and feet after coming home from school. Luckily, her sister-in-law passed down the family sewing machine to her, and although she hadn’t sewn before, she took to quilting, converting the patterns she loved in woodworking into fabric. Without much disposable income, she pulled from the materials she already had — scraps from the scrap bin, her children’s red velvet pants that they’d outgrown, her husband’s old shirts. Eventually, people started giving her their old clothes or unused fabric.
Around this time, Havelka also enrolled in nursing school, hoping to gain a bit more financial stability. “I had no idea what nursing was like,” she says, “but my midwife was also an artist. And I saw her life, and when you’re young — 27, 28, 30 years old — you just don’t know what you’re doing, and I liked how she was doing her life, how she could nurse and be an artist. So I was like, ‘I’ll give it a try.’ I had no idea what I was getting into, but I really liked going back to school.”
Havelka even found inspiration in her nursing classes, especially anatomy and physiology, as she learned more about the body beyond what a model in a life-drawing class would offer. “It just goes deeper. You get into the fluid electrolytes or the cardiopulmonary system; you’re going in and seeing the process of what creates the muscles — the stuff underneath the painting, I guess.”
Immediately, she started designing quilts with linear patterns inspired by the vertebral system. Then the idea of skin, with its wear and tear, came into play. “Skin is the largest organism of the body,” she says. “It’s your first line of defense, and of course you can get into like the whole underlays of skin and skin color and race.” From there, Havelka started staining her fabrics with coffee, tea, wood shavings, rust, and walnuts. She experiments with the fabric’s stains, wears it down, lets it sit out in the sun or rain. “I’ve tortured it, dumped it in water, but I’m giving it some kind of history rather than just picking it from a store. I like the idea of maybe, there’s some kind of struggle. … Each material has its own experience.”
As she delved into her nursing career, she continued making her art, even when her job took her to Germany for five years. While there, she found inspiration in the landscape. Much unlike the flatness surrounding her in Memphis, in Europe, she says, “Everything is up and down and around. … So I got my first vision of what I wanted to do: a quilt basically rolling off the wall.”
Indeed, Havelka wanted to challenge the idea of what a quilt could be; she wanted to break away from the flatness, giving the quilt a structure that curves and bumps on its own. She doesn’t use metal in these quilt sculptures and instead relies on stuffing and the weight of the folds of the fabric itself to function as the bones and muscles. “They’re not permanent; they can still bend,” she says. “So it’s only as large as they can be before they fall on the gravity of themselves.”
In making these sculptures, Havelka doesn’t intend to abandon the tradition of quilting. “I want to do something new with the quilts,” she says, “but I want to maintain the family connection, the history, And so using the clothes, whether it’s from my family and friends, that just keeps with the tradition.” Of course, the sentimental weight these pieces carry has not been lost on her, as she savors each piece, waiting for just the right moment to repurpose it in her art. “Sometimes it’s really hard to cut up,” she says. “But it makes that cut very valuable.”
Through it all, the artist blends the old with the new, letting each material’s experience and history dictate how and when she incorporates it. Even in her show, Havelka has mixed in her earlier work with her newer pieces. In Understory, for instance, she has rested her quilt sculpture on a table she made in college that has since lost its leg. “It’s bridging my past with the present and so what’s buried underneath the Understory is a little bit of my past.”
A quilt, by nature, asks you to think about its layers — what’s on top, what’s in between, and what’s underneath; how each piece of fabric works with another as part of a pattern. “It’s an analogy, I think, to human beings,” Havelka says.
And though her work is quite personal with materials taken directly from her life and her loved ones, she hopes viewers will find a meaning of their own. “It makes me happy to have people see what I’m making,” Havelka adds. “Sharing part of yourself is starting a conversation. If you’re always just stuck in your studio and no one ever sees, maybe it goes to that saying, ‘If a tree falls in the middle of a forest and no one hears it’ — you have to get it out there. You have to have people see it, and maybe they’ll see something they wouldn’t normally have seen, which makes them think of something they might not have normally thought about, which art is all about.”
As a whole, you could say that Havelka’s work is about facilitating connection — from her work as an ICU nurse to the sharing of personal notes tucked away in a wasp nest to the sewing of sentimental materials gifted from relatives. She invites the viewer to consider the whole picture, the entire pattern, and to find new purpose and beauty in the vulnerable, overlooked, or discarded. As Havelka’s first solo show comes to a close, she looks forward to sharing her work in more galleries and hopes to continue building these connections.
To keep up with Halveka visit her website or follow her on social media. “Salmon Skin Fried … and Other Delicacies” closes Sunday, March 5th, at Beverly + Sam Ross Gallery.