Sharyn Hyatt

When I look at my most serious work from the past forty five years, it is without exception, a celebration of the power of women. Those honored in my work are both  ancient and contemporaries…gentle and resilient…loving and fierce…nurturing yet suffer no fools. They are ANGELS and WARRIORS. The Cherokee WARWOMAN was the inspiration for my MFA work.

Warwomen emerged regularly in this matriarchal society, and their stories are woven into the history of my beloved Appalachia. Cherokee women participated in battles, traditionally earning the revered title Beloved Woman (Ghigau) or Warwoman. The bravest and wisest held seat on General Council. In this body of work, my metaphor for the power of women is the arrow pointing skyward. The arrow pointing toward the earth is my metaphor for the loving, nurturing, birthing aspects of
women…the vessel.

An unexpected surprise in the early 2000s occurred when a DNA test linked my lineage to that of a Viking Warrior, made famous when her grave was discovered in the 1880s. Mistakenly thought to be a male warrior, she was buried with her weapons and horses. Research in 2017 revealed the warrior was indeed a woman and this ancient connection renewed my interest in the power of women. This “Birka” grave in Sweden helps reveal a social structure where Viking women held roles of military leaders and strategists. In the early 2020’s my BRAZEN HERETIC series began with my interest in the visual dynamics of the first women MODERNISTS. These women were courageous. In an era where only realism was acknowledged and respected, they dared to paint and sculpt images that were
unapologetically abstract. The forerunner was Hilma af Klint (1862-1944), a Swedish artist and mystic whose work predated and quite possibly influenced the work of Wassily Kandinsky. Klint’s immense body of work grew out of her interest in mathematics, symbolism, spiritualism and seance, resulting in a

Geometric Visual Language from which I draw inspiration. In fact the triangle and circles from my early MFA work, coincidentally, mirror some of Klint’s compositions. Her power resided in her intellect and daring rather than on a field of battle. While viewing this work, one might enjoy looking for the aggressive triangles pointed skyward and the nurturing vessel triangle pointing toward the earth. The numerous spheres are moons symbolizing a woman’s cycle, nature’s tides, the juxtaposition of light and dark, and the divine feminine. In addition, aspects of my personal aesthetic include an obsession with movement, color gradation, and figure/ground ambiguity. These themes and motifs have been present in my work for over 40 years and are part of the visual language that defines a Hyatt piece.