Sea Change
Agnes Pelton
AGNES PELTON, 1931. SEA CHANGE.
Agnes Pelton left Long Island for a new life in the Southern California desert. The sea change of the title is both a personal and a cultural one, as she felt the visual world moving into heady, metaphysical directions. The work is oblique, its abstract forms are shapely and organic, conjuring up the ebb and flow of water and the curvature of the female form in equal measure. It is unplaceable, framed by architectural details that open onto neither sea nor land but instead a consciousness. Pelton saw the movement of thought in the movement of the tides, of nature, that lapped and retreated in quiet crescendoes before crashing into realisation. Art, she thought, channeled the universal energies around us through color and light, able to be perceived as active being which vibrate like, Pelton said, “the fragrance of a flower [which] fills the consciousness with the essence of its life.”