SomerSet 2021
Path is a series of paintings conceptually and physically grounded in the act of creation and disruption to shape new ways of being. The series engages the literal cutting apart of form and the evolutionary process produced. The eventuality of change encapsulates a full spectrum of human emotion, wild, wonderful and unknown, and the resulting effect propels us down any number of resulting paths.
As human beings, we live in and on earth, in habitats, in homes, within communities and workplaces. We find comfort and over time grow into various states of togetherness or oneness as we pass days, months, and years with one another. Energies, bonds, exchanges all work to influence who we are. Our individuality and interconnectivity become part of each other and the world around us.
I have been fortunate to travel on planet earth and spend as much time admiring, observing, smelling, feeling and caring for her as I can. When my feet pad across the earth and stones, I imagine all the living things – plant and animal alike – that once existed 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 inside me. This too is part of who I am. Part of who we all are.
Created over the past ten years, the series Path began as one large work and eventually became nine inter-related works. They grew out of my own journey of relocation, having left my home of 25 years of Kansas City, MO to move to California. The series was conceived in Kansas, initiated in Wyoming and finally completed in California. I made the small paintings that comprise the works in various locations around the world.
The individual pieces are united into new collaged forms yet remain tethered by place with a specific visual language rooted in their geographical origin. As a human is transformed by each new experience, the intermingled small paintings become representative of specific moments in time and space that now belong to these new works.
Anne Austin Pearce