Beyond Boundaries: Artists' Statements
Elisabeth (Beth) Hudgins
Theme: Breaking Through
Boundaries can keep things in or keep things out. Beyond them are places full of possibility but not yet known.
For the “Beyond Boundaries” exhibit, I explore the concept of breaking through both outer and inner boundaries and, specifically, how to break through by blurring those boundaries.
Inner Boundaries: You can no more seal the door of your emotional home than you can your physical house without locking yourself in. The inner boundaries we set are invisible. We are constantly balancing feeling comfortable and feeling confined within our boundaries. We want to grow beyond our limitations but are sometimes fearful of what’s on the other side. By breaking through our inner boundaries, we hope to emerge, develop, discover, and arise.
Outer Boundaries: Perhaps the most common outer boundaries are those that define and delineate physical space. These places are full of visible boundaries: walls, fences, horizons, and borderlines. To break through, we must look for openings: doors, windows, gates, and cracks. The openings might let in light, knowledge, and understanding.
Kathleen (Kat) Jamieson
Theme: Horizons
. . . boundary was the horizon, the still of the sky, separating what the eye could see from what the mind might imagine.
~ Barry Lopez, Author and Environmentalist
Horizon: the elemental boundary line separating wherever we are from what’s beyond that place. All we observe from what we can only imagine.
In starting a painting, I often envision a land- or water-based earthscape; and, usually, I begin with a horizon line sliced across a sheet of paper: the demarcation between what I can and cannot see.
For this exhibition, I conceived a set of “earthscapes” with climate change issues in mind — to illustrate the value of habitat that supports unseen life as we both cause and cross crucial environmental boundaries, tipping points:
“Ghost Lake”: glorious rivers and lakes around the world that are drying to dust;
“Ocean Light”: bioluminescent animals and plants that create eerie light in our waterways;
“Under Water”: fragile ecosystems below the water line and imperiled, low-lying island nations struggling above;
“Tip of the Iceberg”: amazing animals and plants adapting to extreme conditions, and our threat to that melting balance; and
“Wild Fire” and “Storm Strain”: all life affected by continual waves of extreme weather-related calamity.
Linda Maldonado
Theme: Finding Form in Space Without Shape
Where to begin a painting, given so expansive a theme as “Beyond Boundaries”?
As humans, we live with many boundaries. As artists, we can safely, if briefly, experience a form of perceptual expansion beyond familiar and comfortable limits. We can journey into strange areas and through unexpected shapes and structures.
Deliberately avoiding a fixed notion of what a finished piece might be, I applied marks and paint swaths in a seemingly random fashion. I looked for interesting areas to showcase and decided to surround these and allow them to shine. What emerged were shapes suggesting objects in space, some with dissolving edges, some with translucent volume showing other shapes beyond them.
Having begun without specific direction, I feel pleased that my completed paintings convey something of the movement, engagement, and change suggested by the “Beyond Boundaries” theme.
Elise Ritter
Theme: Pausing at the Threshold
Thresholds are transitional places between two worlds.
The ancient Irish called these “thin spaces,” where heaven and earth are especially permeable. They believed that thresholds occur at the point between physical and mystical worlds.
Transformations take place across these boundaries. An old world ends and a new world begins in a process we experience at many points in our lives: births, deaths, relationships, work, travel, health, illness, hellos and goodbyes.
Doors and windows, the stones that guard openings, rock columns amid shifting sands: all are portals to new territory. In nature, we see and hear how thresholds manifest: in light piercing darkness, at shorelines dividing land from water, as sounds of wind in the woods and songs of birds, in the luminosity of spirit guides.
A sense of wonder and awe emerges when we pause at the threshold.
Deborah Taylor
Theme: Stretching Beyond
And if ever there’s a time to move beyond one’s boundaries it’s when one has, literally, moved beyond them.
~ Jill Alexander Essbaum, American Poet and Writer
Stretching beyond a boundary is a process that involves self-exploration, risk, practice, and resolution. Even with intention, we sometimes do not notice, until we are on the other side, that we have crossed a barrier.
By focusing on clearer and stronger creative expression, barriers in one area can allow us to step beyond the place we are, to assume another more abstract and powerful voice.
The boundary between realism and abstraction can be seen as a barrier, existing on a continuum from highly rendered realism to total abstraction.
My paintings for this exhibition are an exploration of my struggle, experimentation, and risk-taking to discover where I land on that continuum.
I have titled my paintings with the first line of translated Japanese haiku poems that date back several hundred years. The poets include Basho, Buson, Issa, and Shaiki.
