User:Itsjaime/Sonya Kelliher-Combs/Bibliography

Biography
Sonya Kelliher-Combs was born on 1969 in Bethel, Alaska and brought up in Nome, Alaska, a place located in Northeast Alaska. Through her art she illustrates the very much present problem of the lack of knowledge of who Alaskans are and their culture in the form of mixed media painting and sculpture. She demonstrates the power and ability that each medium has to influence the mind, create new ideas, and complement one another in her iconography with immensely personal imagery. Her use of synthetic, organic, traditional and modern materials goes past the typical messages she usually sends in her works and instead goes into their interrelationships and interdependence of oppositions she often shows. Her processes communicate the relationship of her works to skin, which is a big part of Native American culture.

Today, Kelliher-Combs resides and operates in Anchorage, Alaska. Being an Alaska Native artist and a big proponent of her culture, she is a member of the Alaska Native Arts Foundation Board, Alaska State Council in Arts Visual Arts Advisory, and the Institute of American Indian and Alaska Native Arts Board.

Personal
A very sensitive artist, Kellheir-Combs has a great knowledge of organic structures and how to use them in art. She expresses the commonalities in every living thing and being through these types of mediums. Her work presents us with something that is both raw and strangely precious as they can appear delicate and even wet-looking. She gives us a new avenue, a new view on the nature of reality coming from a background of traditional Native American aesthetics using her work to answer and bring insight to beaten path questions about existence itself. Much of her art is made with walrus gut, used for centuries by Native Americans in making Inupiaq ‘‘overcoats".

Kelliher-Combs began to have her work put in exhibits and soon gained recognition while still in school in the process of getting her bachelor’s degree. She went to Europe after her graduation from University of Alaska Fairbanks in 1992 and shortly after that married her high school love from Nome--a man by the name of Shaun Combs--and by then got accepted into graduate school at Arizona State University. Because she was so far from home, her time at the University being located in the Southwest proved to be a hard time in her life being away from her husband who had to stay and work in Nome. She dearly missed her family and culture greatly as well. ‘‘We ran up huge phone bills. . . But I’d come home every summer to become re- energized. . . realized that my family, my culture and Alaska were the sources of my creativity’’. But in contrast to this whole graduate school experience, she says all of it was an important ‘‘learning experience,’’ where her work--and even the paintings--had started to evolve and become more object-like and monochromatic.

In undergraduate school, Kelliher-Combs reacted strongly to artists she learned in school such as de Kooning and Picasso. Because of the influence these artists had on her, she focused on adding abstraction into her work. She also became quite interested in ‘‘formline’’ approach, an approach that Northwest Coast art took, having learned this from her Alaskan Native Studies classes. She appreciated how formline already abstracted animal shapes for her and believed that it would make her art unique, specifically her animal imagery. It gave her art aesthetic building blocks where she could remove and add with ease while maintaining a Native American cultural flare. However, she received much criticism for using designs from a Native culture that was not her own in the process of incorporating these new techniques into her work. Luckily, after that, she stumbled upon the work of Jim Schoppert that ‘‘took her breath away’’. She ventured out many times to the University of Alaska’s Museum to see his works and said, ‘‘I couldn’t get enough of it. Schoppert, more than anybody else, was instrumental in helping me see in a new way. He opened a door in my mind that it was OK to do what I was doing.’’ (Dunham 16).

A combination of elemental and the contemporary features became the main principles of Kellheir-Combs' work compared to when she first started out. Her art is minimalistic and the colors she uses typically go back to the body. For example, liquids with blood reds or pale, membrane-like yellow and the purplish-blue of bodily veins. Her blacks are sometimes hair-like but can also be smudged, representing shades like charcoal or tar from organic decomposition. Using this striking, organic aesthetic, she has done mixed-media paintings using acrylic paint and collage elements--including hair and walrus stomach--as well. You can see her paintings as poured layers of acrylic paint and/or polyurethane hung directly onto a wall or put on stretchers.

Education
Kellheir-Combs earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the University of Alaska Fairbanks and Master of Fine Arts from Arizona State University. She learned and made traditional everyday pieces like beadwork and sewing with skins with her mother quite often during her childhood. These skills helped Native Americans to live in the past: skin sewing because their clothes must be have been able to resist the extreme cold, and beading because looks and style "improved" the psyche to face the problems of harsh environments. Growing up, she spent time with other experienced artists in her area as well and studying observing their work which very much influenced and exposed her to new forms of art at a young age, specifically sculpture made from multiple materials. She was used to compliments and appreciation for her drawings from others as a kid saying that she was always a ‘‘doodler’’. But, she actually didn’t take drawing quite seriously when she was young because she thought she would be a lawyer or an engineer, taking the same journey that her grandfather took, who became a federal marshal after that a judge in Nome. Still, she took art classes as a young girl and when she started attending the University of Alaska at Fairbanks, she met someone who found out she was meant to be an artist and that that was what her heart desired. She had the opportunity to study under David Mollett, a renowned artist and instructor who she described as ‘‘honest, upfront, merciless’’ at the university. During one point, he explained how living as an artist is tough and demanding, and that based on the odds, just one person from the whole class would still be creating art as a career in twenty years. Kelliher-Combs thought to herself, ‘‘That will be me.’’. She understood the significance of becoming an artist in order to carry on her Native American tradition after the speech by Mollett. This was the day she finally decided to put all of her effort into becoming an artist. She went to Europe after graduating in 1992 to discover new things that may help improve her art and understand and observe different cultures and how they represent themselves. Artists who she considered influencers to her work at that time and since then include Maya Lin, Ellen Gallagher, Jane Hammond, Anne Wilson, and an artist who used biomorphic forms, Eva Hesse.

Artworks
(1) Common Thread, 2008–10

Reindeer and sheep rawhide, nylon thread

Variable dimensions

(2) Small Secrets, 2009 (detail)

Walrus stomach, human hair, glass bead, nylon thread

Variable dimensions

(3) Red Reindeer Brand, 2009

Reindeer fur, acrylic polymer, cotton fabric, and metal grommets

61 x 45.7 cm

Exhibitions
Solo Exhibitions: Group Exhibitions: