Marge D'Wylde
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Marge d’Wylde (born 1955) is a conceptual artist working in a variety of media. Her work reflects on the nature of contemporary culture. Her artistic themes include myth, visual seduction and cultural.
Born in Oxford, England, d'Wylde came to the United States aboard the RMS Queen Mary with her parents Charlotte and Francis Williams as an infant. By the age of eleven she had committed herself to becoming an artist. Her first paintings were publicly displayed when she was fifteen. Her early academic training was in the figurative and realism movements of the 1970s. She studied with Roy DeForest and Irving Marcus. Another early mentor was William Pugh who was a protege of Wayne Thiebaud.
d'Wylde spent two years in Taiwan studying Chinese painting and calligraphy under the tutelage of Koo Shen Leung, a former director of the Shanghai Museum. He introduced her to both the classical and modern Chinese art movements. She also studied with the few Taiwanese puppetry troupes left practicing in the traditional southern Chinese style on the island. Asian art and culture was to become a lifelong artistic influence on d'Wylde's art.
d’Wylde returned to the United States where she settled into San Francisco’s Bohemian art and theater scene. She co-founded the artist collective Hand Ghost Theatre with Rick Hazel and Kim Ringle. The group developed an eclectic style of performance using puppets, dance, photography and sound. Hand Ghost Theatre worked with a number of local artists to produce a series of multi-media performance works for the theatre and street from 1982-1991. d’Wylde also co-created theater works with Jon Greene, the founding director of Studio Eremos. Steve Winn theater critic of the San Francisco Chronicle described d’Wylde’s work. “…You get some idea of what Ionesco’s public might have felt on seeing the playwright’s anarchistic absurdities for the first time. Or what it might have been like here when Michael McClure’s “The Beard” startled San Francisco in the mid ’60s.[1]”
Hand Ghost Theatre’s playful and slightly anarchistic collaborations included “Modern Home Bondage” and the environmental suite “No Hunting Allowed.” The company also co-produced a series of works with Claude Duvall and the Noh Oratorio Society including Surrealist works by Tristan Tzara.
d’Wylde returned to the academic realm receiving her Masters degree in conceptual design. She studied with Steve Wilson and George Legrady at San Francisco State University. She turned her attention to experimentation with the small screen in 1992 using video and the computer as painting tools. d’Wylde created liquid video paintings both as installations and works for television and projection. One work, “Who Will Cry for the Living” was described by Anita Creamer of the Sacramento Bee as, “The desolation of crushing ennui…. The quiet desperation of ordinary lives. An ongoing trickle of daily grief - the slow mourning for losses we can never articulate – that is more profound than losses to death.[2]"
d’Wylde newest work is a photographic series that explores the “Women of the Americas.” The central themes are immigration, female beauty, and the iconography of women’s status in North, Central and South America. The series was inspired by an exhibition of Renaissance portraits of women at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. d’Wylde continues to explore the visual boundaries between modern technology and fine art in this series.
d’Wylde has participated in artist residencies and symposiums in the United States, Europe and the Caribbean. Focusing on non-traditional art venues, her work has been shown internationally in numerous festivals and exhibitions. d’Wylde has received awards from California Works, the National Cable Television Awards, Puppeteers of America, California Arts Council and the San Francisco Hotel Tax Fund. Most recently, she received a technical award from Adobe Systems for her web contributions to the International Museum of Women’s project “Imagining Ourselves.” She is on the Board of the international artist project Proyecto Arte del Fuego co-founded by Catherine Merrill and Antonio Lewis. This project promotes peace through the placement of Cuban and International artists together for ceramic residency programs.
