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Creative Artist McAllister Brews Cryptic Code
by Michael Costello
Sonya McAllister
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Senior Art Major Sonya McAllister drives a psychedelic 1970s Volkswagen hippie bus. In the evening she walks to her studio in long flowing skirts with her red, hip-length hair in a wrap or flying freely about her. There, using cryptic formulas, Lipton iced tea, print paper, your fingerprints and name, she can transform your identity into art.
She makes "portraits" in which an individual's organic-creative nature is expressed in tea, and the "civilized" characteristics are expressed through a numerical formula that translates a person's name and actual fingerprints into graphics.
She calls her style "unclassified." "I'm a conceptual artist whose idea and process are more important than the actual outcome." Her artwork, which will be on display in Weisenblatt Gallery sometime toward the end of the semester, is indeed very different.
Picture a towering strip of print paper stained by what looks like melting brown ink, strange, glyph-like inscriptions and blown-up fingerprints in an orderly pattern stretched across the paper. You may think you've found yourself in a room of binary code, or in an ancient temple looking at the writings of long ago.
With tea, natural ink and her self-invented code, McAllister is concocting what she calls, "digital emotion." She says she is "beginning to translate words into numbers, representing an individual's insignificance in society and what that means as an artist. It is structure vs. instinctual civilization. Creativity is an organic and spiritually based process. Art, however, as an organic creative process, has to mesh with inorganic civilized structures."
Portrait of Katherine Stadler
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For her portraits, she has used several people from Mars Hill College, including Katharine Stadler and Kristalyn Bunyan. She applies her formula to their names and fingerprints. The fingerprints symbolize identity and individuality. Names most represent their cultural identity.
She says her formulas have a Pythagorean structure. "These are based mostly on philosophy, ritual, superstition and religion that is put into a visually rigid code."
She is very personal with her subjects. She has them flip a coin to determine the size of the paper, code and fingerprints because, she says, "Sharing the work is a huge part of the process."
Using tea to stain the paper reflects the balance of flexibility and inflexibility. Tea goes through stages, she observes.
The paper takes the tea
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"It starts very beautiful and warm, nurturing a persons' moods; however, after time it turns to a foul smell and stains the skin. It's beautiful watching the paper take the tea, but it's also dirty -- a bizarre relationship. I'll never be able to drink a cup of Lipton tea and look at it the same way. I definitely have a relationship with tea."
McAllister admits, "Certain groups of people will be alienated by the work, but I like to leave them with mystery."
Her art does have its costs. She figures she has used at least 1,800 tea bags this year for her project. She also uses premium quality French printmaking paper. Her work has caught the eye of a businessman who made an offer on one of her prints, though she will not sell anything until after the show.
"Money or business…that's not what it's about."
McAllister first made her college debut in 1995-96 in Florida, studying at a local school of art and design. She took some time off from her studies to teach art in AmeriCorps, working with troubled youth and abused children. At one time she even owned a mural painting business to support herself. In her off time she enjoys reading, drinking tea and walking her dog, Mia.
She has lived all over the United States, having moved 25 times in her life, including a stay in the Dominican Republic, where her father worked for a telephone company.
Associate Art Professor Scott Lowrey believes that many of his students could go somewhere with their art, but McAllister stands out. "She is one of the stars of the art department because she has an understanding that it's not just making a pretty picture," he says. "It's the hard work and dedication to make her work communicable to the audience, and she has the dedication and a very strong work ethic."
Art isn't McAllister's only interest. One day she would like to have a black belt in a martial art, revealing that she loves active sports such as wrestling, karate and Ultimate Fighting Challenge. She also wants to travel all over the world to as many countries as she can, searching for the perfect place to live, and settle down to pursue art and a peaceful life.
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