Looking into layers of a life

History, lore and Gaia echo in a Durham artist's collages

The collages hang in the back room of Glance Gallery, the dramatic overhead lighting a summons to the eye. The closer you come, the more interesting the works get.

Here appear to be impossibly thin layers of painted glass, hand-rendered drawings and photography -- woven into a single image, like looking through veils. But that's all digital trompe l'oeil. This image was assembled on a Macintosh and laser-printed onto rag paper.

The collages flow from the imagination of Alyssa Hinton, a 43-year-old Durham artist who works under the weight of history -- art history, family history, world history -- at a depth rarely found in Triangle galleries. Hinton layers references in a long, slow process like creating sedimentary rock. Each collage is a core sample: Look closely enough, and her entire life unfolds.

In the way she contrasts fullness and emptiness, see the years she spent studying painting in a Chinese village. In her fine draftsmanship, see her training at art schools in France and the United States. In her sharply geometric compositions, see the mathematical genius from her father's side of the family, a line that includes Charles Hinton, who pioneered the tesseract (the four-dimensional equivalent of a cube), and George Boole, who developed Boolean logic (a cornerstone of modern computing).

In Hinton's pointed statements about environmental degradation, hear a cacophony of voices from her childhood: neighboring Mennonites who helped raise her in Pennsylvania; the grandmother who founded a Progressive school in the style of John Dewey; the father who used his Ivy League education to run farm experiments and write books about land reform in communist China.

Above all, in every detail of the collages, see her Tuscarora heritage from her mother.

Hinton began exploring her Indian heritage a decade ago. Living in Philadelphia, she joined a native singing circle, where she met the renowned singer Pura Fe. She soon discovered that they were descended from the same people: Tuscarora slaves near Princeton, about 40 miles east of Raleigh. Today, she and Pura Fe call each other cousins.

"It was like the floodgates opened," she said on a recent afternoon at her home in rural Orange County.

She began working with Native American motifs she couldn't even explain. Sometimes, she said, she dreamed the compositions before she created them.

Creating each collage feels like channeling and wrestling at the same time, Hinton said. The results look that way, too -- at once crowded and balanced.

"It's an exhaustive process with disparate elements from many places diverging," Hinton said. "I have to sift it down, distill it down, make it simpler ... but I have to keep it as open as possible for as long as I can."

The display of Hinton's work at Glance Gallery carries an element of discovery. Artists with her level of training and technique don't come along every day. Why has Hinton gone unrecognized?

The short answer is that she was waiting for her moment.

More than the sum of its parts

For all the mystique of her art, Hinton is meticulous and methodical. As she speaks, she is wrapped in two layers of blankets, because heat is expensive. She is sitting on a new floral futon, the first couch she has owned since her daughter Aku-nna was born 15 years ago. The main decor in the house is her art: paintings she made in China, wool weavings from art school and collages propped everywhere.

"I feel really unusual and kind of like I don't fit in," Hinton said. "Which is kind of why I live out in this farmhouse."