Artist Finds Solace in Quiet Rituals

Artist Louise Kames noticed something unusual a few years ago during one of her walks along the Mississippi River bluffs near her home in Dubuque. There were little piles of sticks, placed just so along the road.

When she asked about them at the nearby convent where she used to live, she learned they were the handiwork of a sister who was slipping into dementia, who gathered the sticks to tidy the landscape and calm her mind.

So Kames started photographing the stick piles. She drew them and printed the images onto sheer fabric veils and the pages of a prayerbook.

“I love ritual,” she said. “I mean, what artist doesn’t love ritual?”

Kames (pronounced KAY-muss) is a former member of the Sisters of Charity of the Blessed Virgin Mother and often compares her artistic process to the rigors of religious devotion. She hopes her artwork — drawings, prints and multimedia installations — inspires viewers to do some quiet thinking of their own.

“I find pleasure and solace in the simple act of seeing,” she wrote in her successful application for a 2021 Iowa Artist Fellowship. “My hope is to draw the viewer into a similar contemplative space.”

Often, that starts with just slowing down.

At Clarke University, where Kames teaches art, she likes to arrange a few white eggs under a simple incandescent light so students can see how the light creates subtle colors and shadows across the shells.

“They’re awestruck,” she said. “When students don’t see it, I tell them to slow down their seeing. You just have to slow down.”

That’s harder for most students now than when Kames started teaching at Clarke in 1983. Life is faster. Attention spans are shorter.

But Kames herself has always had a knack for focused observation. She grew up on the western edge of the Chicago suburbs, in St. Charles, and discovered a talent for realistic drawing when she was in elementary school. She was in sixth grade when she decided to become an artist.

She studied at Clarke and earned advanced degrees in printmaking and drawing at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and in art history at the University of Illinois before returning to Clarke to teach.

She also became a sister of the Blessed Virgin Mother congregation, like many of her Clarke colleagues, and practiced that way of life for about 25 years.

“I really enjoyed it,” she said. The sisters are “really wicked-smart women, really engaged in the community and their professional work.”

Kames’ artwork often draws inspiration from the BVM sisters, including the project that began with those sticks. It’s called “I Don’t See Anything That’s Not Beautiful,” a line she borrowed from her conversation with the stick-gathering nun.

For an installation called “Dear Mother,” Kames memorialized 22 deceased sisters by hanging two rows of black cape-like forms, each screen-printed with the letter the each sister had written to the Mother General to request admission into the congregation.

One of Kames’ best-known installations, called “Sacred Grove”, consists of 30, life-size paper columns, arranged like a stand of trees and lit from within like tall lanterns. The artist imprinted the paper ‘trees’ with markings from the pillars of a historic warehouse in Dubuque — a major millworking center at the turn of the 20th century — where the work was first shown.In a way, they symbolized a congregation, too.

Community is a big deal for Kames, who chairs Clarke’s art department and noted that printmakers tend to be effective administrators because they’re used to planning, step by step, to achieve a specific outcome..

Besides, printing presses are expensive, so most printmakers share them and learn to take turns. Kames enjoys the sense of collaboration in a print shop and fosters it among her students. Her classes have potlucks and share doughnuts during finals. She keeps in touch with printmakers across the Midwest, to offer encouragement and swap ideas.

“Printmaking is a working-class medium, like ceramics,” she said. “We’re the beer drinkers of the art world. Painters are the ones drinking wine alone in the attic.”

For Kames, it’s a balance. There is power in quiet contemplation and seeing slowly, but there is strength in numbers, too.

She notices the sticks and the pile. She sees the trees and the forest.

— Michael Morain, Iowa Department of Cultural Affairs