Detail of “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous.” (COURTESY VALERIE HUHN)
For the past 20 years, artist Valerie Huhn has used something very personal to create her work: her own fingerprint.
Huhn uses thousands of her own fingerprints to create colorful sculptures, murals and mixed-media pieces.
Now, that work is coming together in “A Life Rebuilt in Fingerprints,” a solo exhibition opening Sept. 19 at BrassWorks Gallery in Montclair.
The work is deeply connected to Huhn’s own life.
As a teenager, Huhn survived a car accident that left her with a traumatic brain injury, a neurological disability she still lives with today. A series of misdiagnoses later led to her placement in state and long-term psychiatric facilities.
How the fingerprints began
Fingerprinted basketball net. (COURTESY VALERIE HUHN)
Huhn’s fingerprint work began after she moved from New York City to San Francisco and witnessed a police altercation involving a group of young men in her neighborhood.
“The power imbalance of the situation was so jarring,” Huhn told Montclair Local. “It really shocked me.”
She went home and made a fingerprint with the date beneath it. Soon after, she bought journals and ink and began adding fingerprints to them daily.
“The work has always been more of a comment on society and where we are and how we view each other from our various perspectives,” she said.
To create the work, Huhn presses her right index finger onto sheets of clear acetate, making thousands of individually dated prints. She uses a range of colors but avoids black ink because it’s the color used in official booking records.
Many of the prints are then hole-punched into small disks and placed in groups of four on pins, inspired by the four nucleotides of DNA. Huhn uses them to cover books, furniture, clothing and other everyday objects.
A personal connection
Fingerprinted Polaroids (COURTESY VALERIE HUHN)
Years later, the work became more directly connected to her own past.
In 2021, Huhn made a wrong turn while driving home from Princeton and found herself in the parking lot of Carrier Clinic, the hospital where she was first treated for what was then an undiagnosed brain injury.
Memories of her years of hospitalization, which she said she had pushed away, came back. With decades between those experiences and the present, Huhn began exploring those memories through her work.
“So much of the work is an honoring of the people who cared for me in hospital, the neighborhoods I lived in post escape,” she said. “It is a lifetime project for me.”
Huhn creates other bodies of work, too, but said the fingerprint project “feels the most meaningful to me.”
20 years of memories
Black Walden. (COURTESY VALERIE HUHN)
“A Life Rebuilt in Fingerprints” brings together work from Huhn’s 20-year exploration of the fingerprint.
As she finishes installing the exhibition at BrassWorks, Huhn said seeing the pieces together brings back memories of where she was when she created them, along with the friends and family who lent her their apartments as studio space for her large-scale fingerprint murals.
“There is an enormous feeling of gratitude at seeing it all come together,” she said.
She hopes visitors take the time to stop and experience the work for themselves.
“Most of us are so busy, we’re preoccupied with our phones, our lives, etc., that we often don’t have time to look,” Huhn said. “I hope they feel something from the work.”
That could even be irritation, she joked, “at their path being blocked by a faux swing set holding banned books.”
“But it would be fantastic if the work brought them joy,” she said. “For the next few months, it is theirs to experience.”
Huhn’s work has been shown around the country, including at the Hunterdon Art Museum and Morris Museum. She holds a BFA and MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and has received an Individual Artist Fellowship in Crafts from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts.
See the exhibition
“Valerie Huhn: A Life Rebuilt in Fingerprints” opens with a reception Saturday, Sept. 19, from 4 to 6 p.m. at BrassWorks Gallery, 105 Grove St., Montclair.
The exhibition runs through Dec. 18. BrassWorks Gallery is open to the public Monday through Friday from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m.