ANNE AUSTIN PEARCE
Gallery
Path is a series of paintings conceptually and physically grounded in the act of cutting apart and the evolution that process produces.
As human beings we live in/on earth, in habitats, in homes, within communities and workplaces. We find comfort and, over time, grow into various states of togetherness or oneness passing days, months, and years with each other. The act of cutting apart, and the eventuality of change potentially encapsulate a full spectrum of human emotion. The resulting effect propels one down any number of potentially unknown paths.
When my feet pad across the earth and stones, I imagine all those living things – plant and animal alike – that once lived and are now buried beneath my feet. I can feel the telltale hearts of wooly mammoths, smell the green, fresh ferns and hear the yet-to-be discovered hearts of the long dead beat again in me. I have been fortunate to travel on planet earth and spend as much time admiring, observing, smelling, feeling and caring for her as was possible. It seems that nature never seems to fail any large appetite for consuming its natural, visual delights and it seems that human appetites never seem to diminish in their desire to own/possess it.
After my many travels, I now find myself relocated for the first time in twenty-five years, having left my home in Kansas and landing in California. Travel now seems both excessive and destructive to all living beings.
There are nine works included in the series titled Path, which began as one large work and eventually became nine inter-related works. Conceptually conceived in Kansas, physically begun in Wyoming and finally completed in California, these 42”x42” drawings are ink, acrylic and collage on paper.
The pieces that are collaged are, in fact, drawings, made in multiple locations around the world. Each of the pieces that are collaged is tethered by place with a specific visual language tying it to that place. As a human is transformed by each new experience, so are the small paintings made at unique geographical locations, they are now intermingled and representative of specific moments in time and space, inter-woven and contextualized now belonging to these new works.
Anne Austin Pearce is a 2012 Charlotte Street Foundation Visual Artist Award Fellow and has paintings in the permanent collections of the Nerman Museum of Art, Overland Park, KS and the University of Central Missouri, Warrensburg, in addition to numerous private collections.