Anne Austin Pearce

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.

– Anne Austin Pearce

The works of Anne Austin Pearce are rooted in her experiences of the natural world and conceived as inter-related works. With a conceptual foundation, a family of works on paper in ink, acrylic, and collage, evolves together as separate entities of one unified organism.

In series such as Path, Pearce has made drawings in multiple locations around the world. Each work in the series is tethered by place to a specific visual language tying it to that place. Pearce says of this work, ” 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.