To Noël Ash, the dishes in her sink are not a nuisance. For this artist, the dishware has become a central character in her family’s home.
“I really developed a relationship with all the cups, saucers and bowls,” Ash said of her oil painting subjects. “I felt like they were characters in a play that I moved around.”
Her unique “characters” are on display as part of her Things Pile Up exhibit at Arts and Literature Laboratory. Ash is a recipient of the ALL Prize, which is awarded each year to exceptional graduating MFA students from UW-Madison’s art program.
On the surface, Things Pile Up is fairly straightforward: Oil paintings depicting dishes stacked to harrowing heights or scattered beside the focal point: A kitchen sink, usually, or, in a couple cases, a stovetop.
It could be any kitchen, anywhere—especially in 2020. But for Ash, each painting offers a glimpse into the day’s events. Measuring cups suggest she baked cookies, a Cuisinart tool implies, “frozen banana ice cream.”
“There’s a story behind each one,” she said. “Based on what’s in the pile of dishes, there are clues to what’s happened in the last 24 hours.”
A bottle of wine in the background of a messy breakfast scene hints to an evening before. A jar of dijon mustard beside toast and sippy cups suggests the creation of two meals at once (back when kids needed to pack lunch for school).
“There’s memory there,” she said.
She began painting the dishes based on photographs she took of her kitchen, but she didn’t take it seriously until she started painting the high stacks that, in real life, “make me nervous.” Her husband was the creator behind those stacks originally, which she saw as almost sculpture-like.
“I felt like it said something about the sheer volume of dishes that pass through our house each day,” she said.
Ash is a wife and mother of three, and much of her body of work has examined the experience of motherhood. Though these paintings didn’t set out to do that, she soon realized there was an obvious connection.
“A lot of motherhood is necessary tasks that are formative, but it’s only in the accumulation of them that’s formative,” she said. “Every one of those little tasks, if done without love, could be harmful to the child. But doing them right each time isn’t a very rewarding task.”
Dishes may be the most unrewarding of all, as they tend to pile up as soon as the sink is clean - and something, somehow, always seems to be missed.
In the same way the paintings depict dichotomies between times of day, they also shed light on the opposing viewpoints women—especially mothers—can hold of the kitchen.
“One of the great joys is making order out of the kitchen, either by making a great meal or putting everything away and seeing shiny surfaces,” Ash said. “(But) there can be a lot of resentment in the kitchen, too, if it feels thrust upon you. It can be a space of real loneliness and unhappiness.”
When Ash began her paintings, she couldn’t have predicted their first public display would be amid a worldwide pandemic that has forced people to get real cozy with their homes. But she thinks, in that way, “Things Pile Up” has taken on new meaning.
“I think we all feel a little bit of chaos in the house right now, whether we felt it before or not,” she said. “It’s helpful to be able to pin it down and make some order out of it.”
Ash hopes to keep the project going, but the family moved recently, and the new kitchen—with its fancy dishwasher—is not exactly conducive to the required messiness of her work.
“I almost want to get rid of it because there’s not enough things that have to be hand washed,” she said, then paused. “But, I know I also need it because it makes my life easier.”
Things Pile Up is on display through October 31. Gallery hours are 12 to 5 p.m. Thursday through Saturday or by appointment.
