ART, INTERWOVEN

Photographer Denise Jill Marshall refuses to let anything arrest her forward motion: not aggressive deadlines, artistic hurdles, or physical challenges. “Nothing stops me,” she says, sitting in her sunny living room in New Hope, her three-legged chocolate lab rescue, Evy, snoozing at her feet. That relentless energy is also present in her abstract, two-dimensional photographic weavings of color, shape, and texture.

A representational photographer for the first forty years of her career, capturing landscapes, portraits, and medical photography for teaching hospitals, Marshall, 61, was inspired to begin her abstract images in 2020 during a ten-week photography class. In the final week, the class was asked to synthesize the previous lectures and present six new works. Marshall knew exactly what she was going to do and, before she lost the light, ran to her camera bag to start. “And my right arm wouldn’t pick up my gear,” she says.

Since she was born, Marshall has lived with vascular malformation, a condition in which the body creates enlarged or tangled veins in a particular area, often resulting in pain, and, as in Marshall’s case, functional issues in her arm. “Sometimes it feels like my arm is not connected to the rest of my body,” she says.

Unable to complete her assignment, Marshall read through her critiques and noticed a repeated word being used to describe her past assignments: linear. She recalled her medical photography. “There’s nothing straight in the human body,” says Marshall. She sat on her couch and considered linear objects, like ribbon, dental floss, and yardsticks. “All of a sudden, I was like, ‘Oh my god, I have an idea,’” she says.

She cut one photograph of a building into vertical strips and then found another image of a different building and cut that horizontally. She then wove the two images together by hand, alternating each strip over or under in a grid pattern. At 2 a.m., Marshall took a picture and sent it to friends, who told her, “Don’t stop. You’re onto something.”

Six years later, Marshall mostly photographs with an eye toward weaving, looking for images that will work when meshed with other images. Her process used to be deliberate. “I had to number everything,” she says. Now she is more intuitive, often breaking a pattern to ensure a particular section of a photograph is revealed and trying different weaving patterns to create novel effects. She has also experimented with many kinds of papers, including bamboo, watercolor, metallic, pearl, and sugar cane. That experimentation has paid off: Her works have been shown in more than forty regional shows, are included in private collections throughout the United States and Europe, and have garnered numerous regional awards and honors, including First Prize at the 2024 Arts & Cultural Council of Bucks County Members Show.

Marshall’s current work is influenced by the curved lines of Robert Maplethorpe, the encaustic photographs of Howard Hersh, and the intimacy of Alfred Stieglitz’s portraits of his wife, modernist painter Georgia O’Keefe. She often finds inspiration in contemporary art collections at the Michener Museum in Doylestown or the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia. “I seek color,” she says. She also searches for interesting landscapes, like the reflection of clouds off a glass building at the Philadelphia Naval Yard. Sometimes, an idea comes from an unusual source, like a trip through an automatic car wash (more on that later).

Marshall’s first solo show was held in January at Wynter Gallery in Lambertville. Gallery owner Stacy Swiderski had proposed Marshall mount a water-inspired show after viewing Marshall’s work titled Through the Porthole, a mesmerizing weaving of liquid ripples in cool grays and whites. One challenge: Marshall had just three months to create enough new works for a full exhibit. “I’m like, oh my gosh, I’m gonna have to do a whole new body of work,” she says.

Luckily, Marshall had already scheduled a fall trip to New England. While there, she photographed rocky beaches and moody inlets and, within a few weeks, created enough water-inspired weavings with soft textures and atmospheric fluidity to fill the gallery.

She also did some encaustic work, a technique that uses beeswax and damar resin as a medium to add texture to flat images, on some already woven photographs. “She’s someone who truly forges her own path,” Swiderski says. “I find both her and her work tremendously inspiring.”

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arshall has deep roots in the River Towns, living almost continuously in New Hope since 1993 in the same modest farmhouse where she raised her three children and began her professional photography business, Blue Skies Above. She is also a pillar of the local philanthropic community, fundraising for FACT, an organization supporting people affected by HIV/AIDS. She’s currently serving as president of New Hope Arts, and she’s the proud organizer of Wonderful Women on Wednesdays, a networking group with a membership of 200 women, many of whom gather on the third Wednesday of each month at fun locations around the area, such as Manoff Market Gardens and Spring Creek Farm.

This fall, Marshall’s water-inspired work will again be on view at the Artists’ Gallery in Lambertville from November 5 to 29 as part of a show called “Fragmented Landscapes” in a co-exhibit with Prajakta Joshi, a New Jersey–based artist who paints images inspired by nature. “She does these very fluid movements of flowers with energy,” Marshall says. “It goes well with all the senses and colors that I love.”

In early September, Marshall had pieces in the recently revived Art in the Garden, where works from fifty local artists were available for purchase among the apple trees at Manoff Market in Solebury.

Though Marshall began her career creating representative images, she seems to relish her current works’ receptiveness to individual interpretation. For example, Through the Porthole, the photograph that inspired her solo show at the Wynter Gallery, was not of a porthole at all, but a picture of the water jets of a car wash taken through the foggy windshield of her Subaru Outback. “Art is in the eye of the beholder,” Marshall says. “And I love that.”

Melissa D. Sullivan is a fiction writer, attorney, and regular contributor to River Towns. She has also found inspiration in unlikely places, though not yet at the car wash.