In Athens, Ohio, far from her hometown, Newtown artist Haley Kean quietly documented her work on March 31 in the Trisolini Gallery before it was scheduled to be packed away.

Kean, a candidate for a master’s of fine arts in printing at Ohio University, assembled her exhibit “Passive Forms” as her culminating work. The exhibition was on view to the public March 29-April 1.

“Passive Forms” was composed of artistic expressions of abandoned interiors of the Fairfield Hills campus, and was described in her accompanying artist statement as striving to “visually describe the intricate and nuanced relationship between locational attachment and trauma.”

Three tall drawings exhibited on one wall were the first pieces to catch a visitor’s eye upon entering the gallery. Lining the sides of the exhibit at eye-level were small, rectangular plaster objects with realistic, black-and-white etchings of decaying rooms printed onto them.

In the center of the room was a small platform with disheveled stacks of the same plaster castings, many of which look like defected versions of those displayed more traditionally on the side walls. Some of these floored pieces have blasts of white in them, having the effect of light-damaged photographs, and were surrounded by loose fragments and plaster dust.

Kean, who was awarded a grant to complete her work, said she wanted to explore the ability of the abandoned campus to become an important part of the Newtown community through renovation. The artist explained the picture-references for her work were from a digital archive, crowdsourced from anonymous Newtown residents.

“In general, repurposing these buildings and giving them new identities was really interesting to me,” Kean said, expressing that the choice to feature Fairfield Hills in her culminating work spoke to her personal experience growing up in town.

“I feel like Fairfield Hills is this way-finding device,” Kean said. “It’s what we pass by every single day — even if we’re not interacting with Fairfield Hills, it’s a part of our lives. That is what really inspired me.”

The Plaster Portraits

Along the walls, each plaster cast sat on its own, short shelf. These pieces, printed from plates etched by hand, were varying degrees of dark, the darkest featuring a small light source.

“My process is copper etchings, both mezzotints and aquatints, so the image is embedded into the matrix, and then I ink that up,” Kean explained. “Theoretically, you would typically print those etchings on paper, but instead, I was plaster-casting them with plaster of Paris and pottery plaster.”

Kean said her development and decision of her process for these works “just came naturally.”

Initially, Kean planned her exhibit to contain 18- by 24-inch copper etchings. In the final process, she decided to instead make small five- by six-inch etchings on reclaimed copper plates, printed on the unique medium.

Kean said the fact the plates are reclaimed is important, because it speaks to how the town community, including herself, is reclaiming Fairfield Hills from its original purpose as a state-run psychiatric institution to “being an active part of the social ecology of Newtown.”

“I also thought it was important for them to be a smaller scale, because I wanted it to feel more intimate, and more like an object that could be possessed,” Kean added. “Something you can feel attached to, something you can hold in your hand easily and take with you somewhere.”

Kean said she wanted the plaster pieces to be heavy and weighted, and more like sculptural objects than prints hanging on a wall.

The Pile

According to Kean, there is not an ample amount of information available about her specific plaster cast process, so she worked with the material through trial and error.

The artist said she realized she started getting attached to the “failures” that resulted, and perceiving them as their own art pieces.

“I think the sculptural piece in the middle, the plaster that’s stacked in disarray, represents past identities and past histories of Fairfield Hills,” Kean said.

She continued, that the “multitude of associations and identities” are what is “really unique” about the location, with every individual living in Newtown as well as nonresidents having different perspectives of the property.

The Portals

Kean said she chose the reference images for the drawings — hand-drawn with vine charcoal, India ink wash, and micron pen — for their qualities as liminal spaces, portals or vortexes.

“Since I am not able to go inside Fairfield Hills and most people aren’t either because it’s hazardous, I’m sort of playing with the idea of access and limiting access — having these barriers to the work because it’s small-scale,” Kean said.

She said she wanted the drawings to feel “more open” so the viewer feels they could walk through, entering the ideas and space she created. According to Kean, the threefold presentation of the drawings was intentional, too. She wanted the tryptic to be a kind of narrative, she said.

The left drawing Kean sourced from an image she speculates to be one of the underground tunnels, or perhaps a hallway.

“I’m not sure, which is kind of amazing because the image is so obscure,” the artist said, adding that it was kind of the point for the drawing to be “ambiguous and abstracted.”

The middle image, Kean said, is of inside the smokestack, looking upward.

“I felt like it was a hopeful image,” Kean said. “My work is etchings that are dark in value and they’re black and white, so sometimes they can be related to darkness, but I wanted there to be some light in the work.”

The artist directly referenced a twofold experience in the smokestack drawing, noting a duality in how it “was so abstracted yet so representational at the same time.”

The third drawing, on the right, is referenced from a still image of one of the buildings being torn down, according to Kean.

Kean said she wanted there to be a “sense of stakes” in her third drawing to represent the buildings, because they could be torn down as hazardous and abandoned structures. In addition to “wonder,” Kean said she wanted to show “an ending to the story, and ending to an identity.”

Feedback And The Future

According to Kean, it is important in her work to talk about the community of Newtown and about herself as a community member. A 2015 graduate of Newtown High School, she described the Newtown landscape and “close-knit community of really kind individuals” from town as a prominent source of inspiration.

While the images were exhibited far away from their inspired source, the artist said being in Athens made her “particularly lucky” regarding feedback she received from the exhibit.

By coincidence, her studio as a master’s of fine arts candidate for Ohio University is placed in an Athens landmark — an abandoned institution comparable to Fairfield Hills.

“The Ridges is socially reassociated to Athens so much so that it is part of its core identity,” Kean said.

Because of this connection, Kean said her artist statement for the exhibit is “intentionally vague”; she wanted space for a new, unique relationship with Fairfield Hills because Athenians relate.

“I think a lot of folks really understood what I was saying, but in a different way,” she said.

Kean said when her work was coming to fruition, she found herself creating a list of projects she wanted to pursue, and expressed excitement to experiment with new materials. She added she is hoping to create a comprehensive, accessible YouTube video to share her process, which appears to be unique.

More of Haley Kean’s work can be found on haleykean.com, and her documentation of “Passive Forms’’ will be up on the website before she graduates in May. The artist hopes to exhibit “Passive Forms” in Newtown later in the year, when some of the work will be available for sale.

=====

Reporter Noelle Veillette can be reached at noelle@thebee.com.