Brigitta Varadi explores the unseen, everyday rituals of working life. Varadi’s research-based practice is an integral aspect of her art making with each project incorporating experimentation and re-discovered craft traditions.

Exploring the Invisible features a room-size installation of nearly 2,000 ceramic tiles and 19 felted-wool panels made by the artist. The minimalism of Varadi’s art and rawness of her materials belies an intensively laborious process. Instilled with a meditative rhythm, she repeats the same gesture several thousand times as a tile is formed, or wool felted.

In 2019, Varadi visited Shelburne Farms as a BCA artist-in-residence where she interviewed staff and researched the site’s history and farming practices. Through a series of workshops, she led community members in creating handmade tiles as she engaged them in conversations on sustainability and cultural heritage.

Interweaving notions of fine art and craft, labor and heritage, Varadi connects us to the importance of tradition in an era of mass-production and global economies.

Brigitta Varadi’s video is one of two video components featured in her room-size installation Exploring the Invisible. It captures the laborious practice of processing clay sourced locally from Shelburne Farms to transform it into hand-built tiles emulating historical tiles that were once mass-produced in the late 19^th century.

BCA Exhibitions are funded in part by a grant from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, National Endowment for the Arts, and Vermont Arts Council.