Milwaukee-based artist Ava Hager knew at a young age she wanted to create.
Little did she know when setting out for college in 2018 the personal challenges that would shape her artwork.
Hager’s journey is chronicled through sculpture at an exhibition opening Jan. 20 at the Arts @ Large gallery in Milwaukee’s Walker’s Point neighborhood.
Hager is busy installing sculptures fashioned of bent wood—more about what that is in just a bit. Several pieces hang from the gallery’s soaring 15-foot high ceiling.
“Putting them up is like dancing with them. It’s trying to figure out how they’re going to be in a new space,” Hager says.
Your eyes are also drawn to tea bags, which Hager uses in her sculptures. At the moment, dozens of previously steeped, then dried and bundled tea bags are artfully plunked on the hardwood floor.
Growing up in the Atlanta, Georgia area, she made fairy houses of “stuff” she found outside with her grandma. Hager had always wanted a doll house but didn’t get one, so she made her own of her dad’s six-pack beer carton, tipped on its side, filling each “room” with fanciful creations.
Fast forward, Hager moved north and began her art studies at UW-Milwaukee.
“I actually went in as a painting and drawing major. Then I took a 3D concepts class, like an intro 3D class and I switched to sculpture the next semester,” Hager says. “We worked with paper, plaster and then wood at the end.”
Hager’s creations were directly influenced by her own health, starting her freshman year.
“I was really sick with mono and they couldn’t figure out that it was mono. And so they had me taking Ibuprofen every six hours for like three months, four months straight, and it just wiped out the biome in my stomach and I couldn’t eat anything,” she says.
Hager says her tea drinking came from that, “and all of my wood bending,” she adds.
That takes us back to her creations suspended from the gallery ceiling. Hager learned the art of milling long 16th-of-an-inch thick wood strips.
“And then we have a long PVC pipe that’s like 5-inch diameter and 8-feet-long, and then you just put it in there with water, and it soaks for at least an hour,” Hager says.
Then taking them out, a piece at a time, Hager bends it, following designs she initially sketched in a notebook. Although the sculptures appear ethereal, they chronicled Hager’s journey through illness.
"Based on the position of what the feeling was. The pain in my stomach," Hager explains. "Whether it was like crouching or stabbing. That's why there's a lot of inverted shapes in it. I was really struggling to stay afloat."
Hager dealt with another blow her sophomore year, when back in Georgia her mom died suddenly from lung cancer.
Hager funneled her anguish into another sculptural series—this one featuring a mosaic coating composed of eggshells.
“And so all of this has kind of been me, making my own closure. It was really, really hard and to think all this came from it, I’m really grateful,” Hager says.
Her largest creation is titled Steeped. The shell-shaped wooden framework, big enough for Hager to crouch inside, incorporates over a thousand tea bags that Hager sewed into panels of what appear to be paper-thin-fabric.
“And then I went through after each panel was done, and I hand sewed them together with the seams on the outside. I was just interested in creating a new texture," she says. "Then I went through afterwards with a safety pin and I pulled every string to the exterior, as kind of like a little extra element of movement."
There's not enough time to describe Hager's resourcefulness. Like smaller tea bag pieces she's created or how she connected with neighborhood Facebook groups—first in Milwaukee and Wauwatosa, where she now lives—to collect people's steeped tea bags. Oh, and by the way, Hager doesn't waste anything! She saves each string, tag and envelope from each and every tea bag.
“I save everything that will be put to use hopefully soon,” Hager says.
There are more chapters ahead in this artist’s story. For now Hager says she’s delighted to share this phase, the exhibition: Rituals + Vessels.
“This space is now a vessel for these objects and a space for people to come in and practice ritual with us which is tea drinking, breathing practices through meditation, just being aware of our bodies in a positive way,” Hager says.
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