Moving in place

By SUSAN ASCHOFF

© St. Petersburg Times, published June 18, 2000

[Times photo: Pam Royal] Margaret Steward’s work is imbued with gender references, including wooden embroidery hoops, associated with the feminine.

ST. PETERSBURG -- Bleached wooden circles and screen fabric litter the house as though some distracted archaeologist has wandered off in the middle of a dig.

Margaret Steward does not always know what she is seeking. But when she finishes one of her multimedia sculptures, the work holds clues to the past and, to Steward's surprise, her own future.

First, she must begin to build.

She connects stained embroidery hoops to form a tunnel, then runs a black nylon stocking through the middle. Suspended in midair, the doughnut-shaped Standing Oval transcends its skeleton and becomes fluid.

"It has to feel like it's not completely resolved," Steward says of her art. "It brings issues into physical form so you can look at them."

Some clarification comes in knowing about the 47-year-old artist.

She has lived in Europe and north Africa. After earning a fine arts degree in cinematography from Bard College in New York and finding that it did not put food on her plate, she studied geology at the University of South Florida. As a corporate employee, she drilled water wells in phosphate pits across the South. One night while testing a pump, she found herself sprawled in a ditch in Georgia as storm clouds dropped tornadoes. This is not what I want to do with my life, she decided.

Margaret Steward, Umbratio, wood and paper, at Tampa Museum of Art.

She picked up a camera. She sandwiched photographic slides together and made prints of the results. In Progeny, the tangled roots of a banyan tree are layered with images of plywood and iron bridge supports. A small, unmuddied photo of the bare limbs of her husband and daughter finishes Steward's study of roots.

She began painting monotypes. Antennaed shrimp and spiral shells read like fossils in a cobalt sea in Out of Boat.

She evolved to three dimensions, she says, because she had to.

"I like working with spaces that are not solid. When I work with a piece, it gives me a space to wander."

Steward mines hardware and notions stores for humble objects she elevates to icons. Her works are physically fragile but harken to artifacts that have endured centuries. Tissue-thin sewing patterns cover the muscular shape of a shield.

The creations are charged with gender references. Embroidery hoops, pattern pieces, nylons and feathers are feminine. Golf tees and roofing brushes are masculine. A piece in the Tampa show, Mutually Arising, has an opening circled by pointy wooden "teeth." Steward compares it to the suctioning mouth of a lamprey. It becomes overtly sexual when one notices that the mouth has swallowed hollow spheres dangling below like testicles.

"My work draws on issues I may not know are there," she says. "I keep working through it."

Many of her titles are from Chinese tai chi, a continuous series of physical movements described as meditating with eyes open.

Married to an oceanographer and the mother of a 15-year-old ballerina who wants to run off and join a dance company, Steward has recently wrestled with her own wanderlust.

The answer came to her in a dream, she says.

She made Crossing, in which two wooden canoes bisect to form a compass. A feather rests on the end of a single oar. It won best of show in April's Mainsail Arts Festival.

"The piece was all about how you could sit in one place and go where you want to go," Steward says, "as long as you row lightly."

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