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Sophie Whettnall draws one curving white pencil line after another on a black wall in the heart of the Utah Museum of Fine Arts. As she continues, the drawing takes on the look of a topographic contour map or a beach wave pattern or an EEG scan.
Or, perhaps, it's the folds of the Wasatch foothills looming over the museum.
"It's just line after line," the Belgian artist says of the curving strokes about an inch apart. "I don't really control it. But it looks familiar to everyone. It's a very simple natural movement. A ritual. A gesture that gives something I don't really own."
The lines may come from deep in Whettnall's pysche, but she acknowledges that waking up with a spectacular view of Utah's mountains may have seeped in. "When I woke up, with such a view, I wanted to go to the mountains. I'm really a mountain lover and I want to move — I want to go there."
Whettnall, 37, who has shown her work in drawing, video, video installations and performance art in Europe and China, is visiting Utah as part of the UMFA's salt program, which was launched to bring contemporary artists from around the globe to Utah.
Whettnall, whose work often explores the meaning of space, landscape and the self, seems a good fit for exhibit series anchored in the heart of the Mountain West's long horizons. "When I woke up and saw those mountains, I thought this is so right that I'm here," the artist said. "This might sound conceited, but I thought, 'This is made for me!' "
UMFA's acting chief curator, Jill Dawsey, who invited Whettnall, is delighted to hear that. "I think in a site-specific way," she says of the salt program. "I hope the shows we bring will have a relevance to this place and this moment."
Dawsey first encountered Whettnall's work in "Shadow Boxing," a video featured at the 2007 Venice Biennale, in which Whettnall stands rigid as a boxer throws punches so close to her face that her hair moves and her pupils dilate. "I loved that piece," Dawsey says.
Whettnall's work, she hopes, will strike a common chord with Utahns who love their mountains and being physically involved with them. "This is a person [Whettnall] who is thinking about landscapes in interesting ways and using her body in her work — a physical person."
Indeed, Whettnall is bringing the full range of her talents to the UMFA. Besides the evocative white-on-black mural, she is showing her video "Over the Sea," which chronicles — step by rhythmic step — her legs as she walks 60 miles in high heels through a city to a secluded Spanish ocean cliff.
The video explores limits of land and self. The ocean overlook where Whettnall's high heels stop "was the end of the world at that time, but what is it to me now?" she says. "I have no limit."
She also will be installing "Waterfall," a 2008 video that reflects her early training as a painter. Whettnall's waterfall seems unchanging as an oil painting or a photograph — until you study it closely.
Following her interest in space, self, silence and overwhelming landscapes, it comes as no surprise that Whettnall is excited about exploring Utah expanses. She is planning forays into the mountains, to Promontory Point, the Kennecott copper mine and, of course, to Robert Smithson's monumental earthwork "Spiral Jetty" in the Great Salt Lake.
UMFA's salt: Sophie Whettnall
O For more views of the work of innovative artist Sophie Whettnall, visit http://www.sophiewhettnall.com.