Description
ARTIST STATEMENT
The work begins in digital applications and moves outward into the physical: drawing, painting, collage, and printing onto archival papers, aluminum, and crystalline-coated polymer. Acrylics, oils, pastels, and metallic foils accumulate until each surface holds the kind of density that rewards slow, close looking. The digital and the analog are not in tension here — they are the same gesture, carried across different materials. Process and surface together become the argument.
Ward’s fictitious women occupy a space between the universal and the particular, open enough for viewers to bring their own interior narratives while maintaining a distinct psychological presence. Like the fictitious portraits examined in nineteenth-century literary tradition — from Poe to Wilde — her figures carry something the visible surface alone cannot contain. The portrait becomes a site for what cannot quite be said.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Nancy Jo Ward creates portraits of fictitious women; figures assembled from imagination, cultural fragments, and layered process rather than any singular face or life. Constructed presences invented to hold emotional weight, they invite an inner dialog with the viewer’s own experience of memory, loss, resilience, and self.
Work begins in digital applications and moves outward: drawing, painting, collage, and printing onto archival papers, aluminum, and crystalline-coated polymer, then worked by hand with oils, acrylics, pastels, and metallic foils. Her experimental video and augmented reality works extend this inquiry through duration, atmosphere, and layered imagery. Permanent site-responsive LED installations bring it to architectural scale.
Ward earned her MFA in Fine Art Digital with Distinction from the University of the Arts London, Camberwell College, and studied at the School of Visual Arts, New York. She has exhibited across the US, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East.
© Nancy Jo Ward