'You want them to look'

Her home's one, octagonal room is perched like an owl on the marsh in Sea Pines.It's a singular world, but only five flaps of a heron's wing from Harbour Town, the postage stamp of Lowcountry tourism.

After decades of working in near anonymity on huge collages of images and print clipped from piles of magazines and books, and three-dimensional compositions of found objects, Aldwyth is finally bridging those two worlds.

Her first major retrospective is now on display in Savannah, and it is turning heads nationally.

"Aldwyth: Work v./Work n. -- Collage and Assemblage 1991-2009" will show through May 17 at the Telfair Museum of Art's Jepson Center in downtown Savannah.

In October, the show was the centerpiece at the opening of the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art's new Cato Center for the Arts at the College of Charleston.

Halsey director and senior curator Mark Sloan organized the traveling exhibition, which has its last stop in Savannah. It debuted last May at the Ackland Art Museum in Chapel Hill, N.C., which purchased a piece for its collection for more than $30,000.

Sloan said Aldwyth has what people in his trade know as "a singular vision."

"Her work doesn't look like anyone else's work in the history of art," he said. "She has created her own form. Everything has this almost out-of-time feel to it. It could be from the 18th century, or last week."

Ralph Ballantine, a dean of Hilton Head's prodigious art scene, said, "She's right at the very top of the people who are genuinely, genuinely artists. (Aldwyth) is working in a sphere that is higher than any that exists here."

Nationally, Oriane Stender wrote in artnet magazine, "Her work, large collages and more portable sculptures, hits you in the gut and the brain in an expertly crafted one-two punch. She offers challenges as well as pure retinal pleasure."

The 110-page catalog for the exhibition published by the Halsey Institute was picked up for national distribution by Artbook.com, a rare honor, Sloan said.

Aldwyth is pleased with the exhibition. "It is whatever they want," she said. "I wouldn't dictate to anyone what they should see in something. You want them to look."

LOWCOUNTRY ORIGINAL

"Aldwyth" was her middle name, but it is now legally her surname. And she has dropped the use of her given name, Mary.

At 73, she has long been known to the local arts community. She was invited into the famed Artists Round Table that met every Thursday morning at the Red Piano Art Gallery on Hilton Head to discuss art. She called that association from the 1970s her "MFA." The artists gave her something few art schools could: encouragement.

Aldwyth came to the Lowcountry as a teen when her father, a Navy chaplain, was stationed in Beaufort. She attended Beaufort High School for a year and a half before the family moved to the Washington, D.C., area. The summer after high school, she studied art under Ben Summerford. Then she started work toward her University of South Carolina degree in fine arts that, through many turns in the road of life, took her 13 years to complete. She had art training, but considers herself basically self-taught.

She returned to Beaufort in the early 1960s, living in one of the first homes in Spanish Point. Her parents, Paul W. and Muriel Dickman, retired to Beaufort and lived in the neighborhood.

She came to Hilton Head in 1967, living for a year with her three small boys -- Reb, Joe and Bill -- on a 87-foot yacht docked at Palmetto Bay Marina. Later, as a single mother, she worked up to five part-time jobs at a time.

Today, she rises around 3 a.m. from a roll-up mattress on the floor, then works in the one large room with glass windows all around that make up her 900-square-foot home on Deer Island. She clips and files drawers full of pictures -- eyeballs, nudes facing left, nudes facing right -- and pieces them into subtle, sometimes humorous messages in collages that are never figured out before she starts.

She says she lives simply, on about $400 a month in Social Security. The house is paid for, and she says she has generous grown children, and a sister and brother-in-law, Joyce and Jack Keller of Hilton Head, who are tremendously proud of her.

WORK

Aldwyth has sold art through the years -- often oils that were small studies of shape or color, such as watermelons. She has had a number of art residencies, fellowships and grants, and her work has been displayed in many juried shows. But she has not commercially pushed her collages. Until the show, they were in her home, where she may crank up the music while studying, cataloging, archiving, collecting, exercising -- and working.

"Suddenly it dawned on me," said Sloan, who has led Aldwyth's

coming-out party, "I'm dealing with an art monk, basically."

Aldwyth says she's not a recluse, though she would not permit a photograph showing her face. She is an art historian, a reader of nonfiction, and a longtime visitor to the galleries, libraries, book stores and flea markets of New York and Washington.

"One important thing about my work," she said, "is included in the title of the exhibition. 'Work v./Work n.' The product and the doing are of equal importance."

Aldwyth goes by self-imposed rules. Everything she clips and pastes into a collage must be the original. Nothing is resized or reproduced. She likes squares. She does not like frames. Everything must be produced in her

studio/home, though she did assemble the parts of a large piece in her sister's garage.

At the same time, she hates rules. And that's how Sloan got to know her.

She had applied for a South Carolina Arts Commission fellowship. Instead of filling out an application, she sent an

assemblage called "Application." Sloan got a call. The fellowship was out because Aldwyth didn't follow the rules. But maybe he'd be interested in seeing her application.

Aldwyth has always experimented and built things. She credits a gift from her sister, Joyce, two thick volumes called "Zell's Popular Encyclopedia" (1871), for aiding her artistic evolution. She clipped out every illustration in it to form the 79-by-76-inch collage, "The World According to Zell."

FRIENDS

Artist friend Betsy Chaffin of Spring Island enlarged Aldwyth's world by giving her rolls of large Okarawa paper, and suggesting she do an arts residency in Colorado. Aldwyth went as a painter, and came home a bronze-casting woodworker. She produced "Evolution of a Species" there.

On the day after Hurricane Hugo smashed into the Lowcountry in 1989, Aldwyth went with artist friend Louanne LaRoche into the devastated Charleston area to take supplies to artists. She saw piles of refuse, and from that flowed many new assemblage works. She laughs that this "junk" is now being handled in art museums by workers wearing white gloves.

Aldwyth's current project will center on six lectures by the late Kirk Varnedoe, a Savannah native who taught art history at Princeton University and was head curator of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art. His Mellon Lectures at the National Gallery of Art were published by Princeton in 2006 as "Pictures of Nothing."

"It's a little obscure," Aldwyth said. "I'm charting his book. I'm trying to understand what he's saying, and then make it visual."

Her finished products take hours to digest. But Aldwyth says she's not trying to tell a story.

"No, I'm trying to learn something."