Nancy Pobanz' textile hangings are made literally from raw, private thoughts

THE ART of Nancy Pobanz is built on secrets: personal secrets, deep secrets, written thoughts so confidential she doesn't want even to revisit them herself, much less show them to others. And yet she methodically turns these confessions into works of art for the public to admire. The elegantly composed abstract textile pieces in a show of her works at White Lotus Gallery through Feb. 15 are constructed, in various ways, of Pobanz's journal writing, always with the content sufficiently obscured to protect both her privacy and, perhaps, our own sense of good taste.

Take "Vigil," a large wall hanging consisting of a grid of small squares of linen, each supporting what might at first glance be several horizontal twigs or stems. She made the piece when her mother was dying of cancer three years ago in Ontario, Ore. Pobanz, who had grown up in the desert, made the trip back over the Cascades to become her mother's caregiver in the final months. She brought along art supplies. "Mother always wanted us to have a project," she said.

So Pobanz selected the linen fabric, which she said reminds her of the desert, with its dryness and toughness, and brought paper that she had made herself from yucca fibers. Each day she and her mom would write their thoughts on the yucca paper and then twist the words, unread, into threads. Pobanz would add a square of linen to the hanging and cover it with their unreadable words. Her mother began to look forward to the process each day as much as she did.

``Mom, every day, would say, `Nancy, maybe this is a good time to start on `Vigil,' ' Pobanz said. By the end, when her mother could no longer communicate, Pobanz invited her four brothers and sisters to join her in the journaling. "They found it incredibly cathartic," she said.

Pobanz grew up in Ontario and studied art at the University of Oregon. Along the way, though, she spent two years studying in Mexico, where she received her bachelor's degree from the University of the Americas. She lived and worked as an artist for six years in the Philippines before resettling in Oregon. Her work in the White Lotus show combines the warmth of natural materials with severe geometric abstraction. Squares predominate, repeating themselves in grids and patterns that are worked out in the warm colors of the Eastern Oregon desert.

This is no accident. Lately the artist has been working with natural pigments found by digging various colored earths on her travels, and Eastern Oregon has a lot of exposed geology to dig into. Turning dirt into pigment meant a fair amount of trial and error. Pobanz began by simply dumping rocks, sand or clay into a kitchen mortar and pestle and grinding away until her hands hurt. She combines the refined pigments with various binders, from egg yolk to acrylic medium, before applying them to her works.

Adding obscured words from her journals began a few years ago when she was slowed down by a back injury and found herself writing difficult thoughts on paper. "I wanted to be able to write without editing," she said. "I didn't want to read any of it again." But how, she was asked, does this unreadable text contribute to an actual work of art?

Pobanz isn't sure. But she's sure it works. "That's my question," she said. "I thought, `I can't put this in the show. Nobody's going to get it.' And yet these are the pieces that people respond to the most. I don't know why.".

Feb. 2, 2003