In the afternoon of Friday May 26, we had a treat waiting for us during lunch at the Alumni center. Mary Griep, a professor at the Art & Art History Department at St Olaf College, did a presentation on her “Sacred Spaces” project.

Griep’s work is part of collections throughout the United States. She was Field Supervisor for St. Olaf’s Term in Asia in 2000 and 2003. In 2004 she returned from a leave of absence in Chiang Mai, Thailand where she completed a series of large scale Southeast Asian temple drawings.

Watch this video to listen to Griep talk about her work (click on image; not on text links).

As the author says, her drawings “are not purely descriptive. I feel that they start [...] with an accurate description of the place and then I think about what’s happened to those buildings over the years. Drawings can deal with space in terms of illusion but how does drawing deal with time?”

In her presentation during the workshop, Griep included beautiful drawings of:

• the Mosque Series (begun in 2007 as a study of the Ulu Camii (Great Mosque) of Divrigi, Turkey) ,
• the Southeast Asia series – works completed 2000 – 2004 while an artist-in-residence at The Center for the Study of Religion and Culture, Payap University, Chiang Mai, Thailand
• the Mayan Series – 2005 – 10 – Late Classic Mayan sites from the Yucatan, Mexico