Stuart’s monochrome rubbings of the 1970s simultaneously challenge the hard-edged aesthetic of Minimalist painting and its industrial materials, as well as the relationship between drawing and the artist’s hand. The procedure she developed — rubbing or pressing actual earth and rock from specific sites onto muslin-mounted rag paper — creates works that are simultaneously topographic documents (this is the earth of New Hampshire, inscribed by its own geology) and abstract drawings. The NH designation roots the work geographically; the accretion of stone and soil onto paper recalls the geological processes by which strata are formed over millions of years, compressed here into a single act of sustained contact. Stuart’s contemporary Ana Mendieta worked the body into the earth in a related but more performative mode; Stuart’s quieter process leaves the body out of the image but embedded in its making.
