This Friday’s Feature artist is Val Britton!
I love the intricacy of her worldscape series and admire her deeply personal motivation for her work.
From her artist statement:
I make immersive, collaged works on paper that draw on the language of maps. The impetus for this body of work was my longing to connect to my father, a truck driver who drove eighteen-wheelers across the country; he died when I was a teenager. Based on road maps of the United States, routes my father often traveled, and an invented conglomeration, mutation, and fragmentation of those passageways, my works on paper help me piece together the past and make up the parts I cannot know.
My mixed media abstractions map not only physical locations but also psychological and emotional spaces.
Painting through staining, seepage, and absorption becomes a metaphor for the fluidity of remembering, mimicking the geologic layers that constitute memories.
Traveling, navigating routes, mapping our experiences, making choices at a crossroads, viewing purpose as a destination: these common metaphors link experiencing life with the notion of a journey. In my work I often think about how the retelling of our stories, the reconstruction of our journeys, helps us make sense of the now, and how the retelling is its own journey. Mapping serves as a metaphor for searching, an implication of the unknown in wide, open spaces, and a trace of how we see where we've been.
I love the intricacy of her worldscape series and admire her deeply personal motivation for her work.
From her artist statement:
I make immersive, collaged works on paper that draw on the language of maps. The impetus for this body of work was my longing to connect to my father, a truck driver who drove eighteen-wheelers across the country; he died when I was a teenager. Based on road maps of the United States, routes my father often traveled, and an invented conglomeration, mutation, and fragmentation of those passageways, my works on paper help me piece together the past and make up the parts I cannot know.
My mixed media abstractions map not only physical locations but also psychological and emotional spaces.
Painting through staining, seepage, and absorption becomes a metaphor for the fluidity of remembering, mimicking the geologic layers that constitute memories.
Traveling, navigating routes, mapping our experiences, making choices at a crossroads, viewing purpose as a destination: these common metaphors link experiencing life with the notion of a journey. In my work I often think about how the retelling of our stories, the reconstruction of our journeys, helps us make sense of the now, and how the retelling is its own journey. Mapping serves as a metaphor for searching, an implication of the unknown in wide, open spaces, and a trace of how we see where we've been.
worldscape I, 2010, paper construction with ink and tape, approximately 43 x 43 inches
worldscape II, 2010, paper construction with ink and tape, approximately 4.5 x 5 feet
worldscape III, 2010, paper construction with ink and tape, approximately 9 x 9 feet
worldscape VI, 2011, paper construction with ink and tape, approximately 38 x 30 inches
To find out more about Val Britton and her work, visit her website!
TGIF!
Mary^
TGIF!
Mary^
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