About the artist:

Lesley Dill is an American contemporary artist. Her work, using a wide variety of media including sculpture, print, performance art, music, and others, explores the power of language and the mystical nature of the psyche. Dill currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

Dill was born in 1950 to high school teachers, and was raised in Maine. The natural landscape in Maine served as an inspiration for her work and its impact can be found in several pieces, including the installation piece SHIMMER (2005-2006).

Dill received a Bachelor of Arts in English in 1972 from Trinity College and went on to receive a Master of Arts in Teaching from Smith College in 1974. After a period of teaching in public and private schools, Dill went on to receive a Master of Fine Arts from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 1980. It wasn't until her late twenties that Dill began to consider a career as an artist. Growing up, she was an avid reader, and her fascination with language can be found in her art. Before pursuing a career in art, Dill's exposure to art was mostly limited to the crafts practiced by various family members, including ceramics, linocut printing, rug making, and weaving. As a result, some craft practices can be found in her art.

In 1985, Dill married filmmaker Ed Robbins, and their life together has played a role in shaping her work, especially in the places they traveled together.

In the eighties, Dill began working in sculpture, creating both wood and cast bronze sculptures. A gift of Emily Dickinson poems in 1990 proved to be important to the development of Dill's style, as she began to work the text of poems directly into her pieces, something that she has continued throughout her career with the works of a variety of poets, including Emily Dickinson, Pablo Neruda, and Salvador Espiru.

Another major influence on Dill's work is the time she spent living and working in India with her husband. There she was impacted by the landscape, weather, architecture, clothing, and other sensory aspects of her environment. Her decision to experiment with painting text on human models and photographing these "living sculptures" was inspired by watching Indian women creating henna designs.

Her forays into photography transitioned into working in performance art, with pieces like Speaking Dress (1994). She explores the relationship of text and language to a variety of media, often employing a diverse range of materials. Voices in My Head from 1997, in the collection of the Honolulu Museum of Art, demonstrates how the artist combines photography with text, embellishing the work with charcoal and thread. Dill has described language as being "...the touchstone, the pivot point of all my work." Her work crosses traditional boundaries between artistic disciplines and includes printmaking, drawing, sculpture, photography and performance art, often used in tandem with one another.