#24: September 18th, 2026

On the Work of Anna Fidler
by Benjamin Terrell

Spirit Elevator for Cats
2024, gouache on linen, 28"x20"

​When the very first AI chat-bots were left alone online it was observed that they would seek
out and watch endless hours of animal videos.

Hilma af Klint left instructions that her work not be viewed by the public for at least 20 years
after her death. When finally displayed by LACMA in the late eighties it was said that the work
never looked right, never looked happy until it was hung on the wall that had a clear view of an all white quilt from the museum's permanent collection hanging in a neighboring room.

Anna Fidler in her studio (Corvallis, Oregon)

​Rachel De Puy's all white quilt from 1805 is stitched with what looks like pineapple shapes,
sunflower shapes, birds and botanical forms. White on white, a cloud cumulus, a blanket for the sky. Or a textile as a thought bubble for the bed and all that it contains. Pure palette, to cover loved ones, sealing the undefended act sleep, quilt above like the entire atmosphere. Lastly, the maker's name — signed, in large looping letters.

I have heard, for those who have been born before and for those who will return here again,
what we fail to resolve will be waiting for us when we return.

​When anything enters for the first time, like a series of paintings or even a chat bot, it will
naturally gravitate toward what generates the most pleasure and awe.

Hawk + Mist
2021, gouache and flashe on handmade grid paper, 43.5" x 35”

​Dusk is the day's blanket, is a turning away from everything outward toward anything inward.
Every day, for less than an hour in downtown Portland thousands of American crows gather on power lines above streetlights, starting their shift illuminating the emptying streets. They gather for warmth, for safety, for food below but mostly for an ear-piercing offloading of the day's events, enemies and unimaginable information. I have read that they travel sometimes from fifty miles away for this daily ritual, sometimes numbering 20,000 in a 400 block radius.

​To imagine that network — the blocks upon blocks, the exhaustive endless above-ground
wiring and its invisible network of illumination — is an entire image as the epistemology of
connectivity. To imagine it is to envision the underpinning of every piece of visual art made by
Anna Fidler.

Ascending, Descending
2022, gouache and ink on handmade grid paper, 20" x 15”

​There is a work on paper by the artist — Looking — where the grid is felt but not seen. A grid
as a nesting place for motif. As a net to harvest and hold. As a filter to keep things out. As a
trellis to enable growth. As an antenna to tune and convert. On it are infinite eyes with minor
variations in color schemes — pink, coral, pink. Other repeating motifs, eyeball, eyelid --
browns, orange, purple and navy give the piece the feeling of individual voices comprising a
choir.

Also atop a penciled network sits Ascending, Descending, a depiction in gouache of three
towers that comprise a cathedral or suggest a holy hierarchy. Or perhaps each is instrument,
tower as tool, something solar capable of capturing what the sky sends. The translator, the
transmitter, and the transducer.

Imagine great towers as receptacles of vast information standing in empty deserts, where the
sky reveals more. The dust of stars above and the dander of us below, both calcium particles.
Both present in the blackest black — bone black — and the whitest canvas cover — gesso, two essentials for any visual artist.

Size determines an object, but scale determines art. A room could be made to take on the
immensity of the solar system, wrote Robert Smithson. I have seen small Anna Fidler pieces
that fill the room and wall-size pieces that absorb entire buildings when you are able to separate size from scale.

Scale operates by uncertainty, observed Smithson. The macro and the micro share intimacy
and accuracy — a false fiction of detached speculation, the way horoscopes depend on the
unknowable and unverifiable. To know Fidler's immensity may be only to stand next to its
unknowability.

Spirit Elevators in the studio

Irodori gouache against the color of Japanese bath salts dissolving:
Japonica yellow, yuzu yellow.
Pale patina, milky white.
Seedling green, cloudy jade.
Dayflower blue, dusk blue.
Shared in both — clay, chalk, talc, iron oxide.

Information and observation add to art, but even these words will ebb and dissolve like bath
salts in water. A show comes down. The piece returns to the studio, or moves to some other
wall, some other room, and the scale it briefly commanded goes with it. Perhaps context itself is entropy.

A bathtub with dissolving colored bath salts is a rounded Victorian stained glass window at its
most diffused. A stained glass window rounded at the top is an Anna Fidler painting. This
painting — Spirit Elevator — masquerades as an elevator measuring six feet tall. Do the blues, creams and pinks with numbers atop transport? If soothing eases passage, then yes. 

- Benjamin Terrell

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