PROJECT STATEMENT

This piece of writing was listed as my “Artist Statement” during 2010.  My work has since evolved, but I still feel proud that this best describes my aims for “2010 Gallery”  in my portfolio.
To retool, to reinvent, to recover, to revise.  These are ideas I apply to the landscape in my works in the media of colored pencil, cut paper, acrylic and watercolor.  I am fascinated by ways in which life could persevere and reclaim once we’ve exhausted a space and abandoned it.  To feed this fascination, I look for moments of natural triumph in worn out spaces. The work begins with a photographic gathering of textures, creatures and spaces.  I then use my photos to build future possible worlds where life reinvents itself.

 I’m greatly influenced by the writing of Octavia Butler in her lush and disturbing descriptions of a renewing earth in her series Lilith’s Brood. In her book Adulthood Rites, humanity returns to the war torn earth they left behind to find the very fabric of the land and its nourishment to be evolved and altered. In this scenario, humanity must decide whether to whither on our own, or to crossbreed with a new species who promises us new appendages, new abilities and new foods.  I seek to tap into the emotion we might feel being at the conscious brink of evolution: a feeling that is alluring as well as repulsive.

In the past year, I have been exploring the mysteries of life that could exist in such a world.  I am searching for ways to represent an uneasy landscape that is slowly healing itself.  I am not interested in portraying devastated and exhausted worlds, nor I am I interested in dwelling on my own exhaustion and devastation.  My work represents regrowth in myself and my world.

-Jamie Treacy 2010