ARTISTS STATEMENT
As an artist and mother, I approach painting as both a sacred act and a way to give form to the invisible. In my recent works, I’ve created portal paintings that are reliquaries containing my children’s baby teeth. These paintings are deeply personal, yet they are rooted in the Catholic tradition of relics – physical objects believed to carry spiritual significance and the power to connect us to the Divine. The portals serve as contemporary “soul portraits” while also referencing the form of a monstrance, an object traditionally used to display the Eucharist – a symbolic threshold between the earthly and the divine. My materials are often imbued with personal history. The Keeper, for instance, incorporates a piece of bedsheet my husband and I shared – a material charged with the physical and emotional intimacy of our marriage and the labor of caregiving. These elements transform the paintings into both relics and reliquaries of motherhood, turning the domestic into a site of spiritual reflection and honoring the sacred dimensions of family life. Rather than depicting linear biblical narratives, I’m drawn to the poetic and revelatory spaces in scripture – the metaphor, the whisper, the wilderness, where deep calls to deep (Ps 42). My work reframes spiritual expression and caregiving as more than physical or emotional labor but as a transcendent and transformative state of being. Through these pieces, I aim to explore the mystery of the soul and reimagine motherhood as a bridge between the sacred and the everyday.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
A Dutch-Italian American and native Californian now living and creating on a farm in South Carolina, Kristen van Diggelen Sloan is a contemporary American artist known for her Neo-Baroque oil paintings and sculptures. Her familial roots in the American Southwest, the coastal landscape of Northern California, and her Roman Catholic upbringing deeply inform her visual language. She employs circular symbolic devices to evoke unseen realities, reimagine visionary encounters, and explore the complexities of the human interior. Sloan received her BA in Visual Art from UCLA and her MFA in Painting from the San Francisco Art Institute, where she was awarded the prestigious Graduate Fellowship in Painting. Her work has been exhibited nationally at venues such as Art Basel Miami, Art Chicago, The Headlands Center for the Arts, and The McColl Center for the Arts. A 2024 Sacred Arts Fellow at The Grünewald Guild, her work has been featured in Luxe Interiors + Design, the San Francisco Chronicle, and 7×7 Magazine. Sloan relocated from San Francisco to a farm in rural South Carolina in 2014, where she currently lives and works.
© Kristen van Diggelen Sloan