ARTIST STATEMENT
Artwork is transformational. It provides exploration, adventure, and fellowship.
My personal narrative drives my artwork. It documents my social, visual, and personal landscape. My choices are impulsive and emotion based.
I work with clay, paper and textiles. Techniques and themes cross pollinate and migrate seamlessly from one medium to the other. Each of them is a joy.
In ceramics I throw functional forms that I keep uneventful and quiet. There should be no superfluous connotations linked to my shapes. In textile I also like to keep the imagery simple through a combination of screen printing and stitching. I try to avoid cultural or historical references that would compete with my story.
I witness the events of daily life. They blend into each other their elusive moments, colors, patterns, memories and relationships. Tenuous items, they can be favored and cherished. With each technique I celebrate seemingly unremarkable moments.
My inspiration comes from my engagement with my surroundings and my enjoyment of what it brings into view.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Born in Paris, we went to the Louvre. We had no TV nor comic books.
Literature was my first love. Our tired mother read to us at night.
Our gray elementary school had iron gates that clang shut. But our notebooks had horizontal blue lines. Our ink was blue.
Blue lines are magnificent. They invite us into the infinite space of the page.
High school was an exciting mess. My teachers will never leave me.
Then art school for a year. Not two.
Then I graduated from the Sorbonne and stayed for a master’s degree.
I taught in a stained-glass studio. I like the Middle Ages, still.
Moving along, I was a teaching assistant at Northwestern, where I became a foreigner away from my homeland. My Ph. D topic was Nostalgia. I studied and taught and got married.
We traveled. Me, with a sketchbook.
I took a printmaking class. I designed children’s books.
We had a little girl. Parenting threw me unprotected into American culture.
Expectations and cultural differences consumed me. I wrote a desperate novella. Never published.
I discovered cross cultural writers and their love for two cultures: native and adoptive. I accepted nostalgia and guilt. I relaxed a bit.
Divorce. Ceramic classes and comfort with compassionate teachers.
Child goes to college. Pets die. It is all about work.
As I live longer, my art is driven by the enjoyment of solitude, regrets, and enchantment that I celebrate in ceramics, printmaking, fiber arts and writing.
Never enough.
© Anne Bernard-Pattis