Melissa Herrington

"My art functions as a lens through which I can see the world from diverse perspectives and in unlikely ways. Brought up by my mother, two aunts, and a grandmother, I had a unique childhood that instilled in me the importance of education and imagination, contributing to both my artistic views and my drive to purse them. My work, partly in response to the influences of my childhood, examines the theme of identity based on folklore, shared stories and dreams. There is a sense of familiarity and distance that creates cohesive surface tension. These elements have dual characteristics, with imagery that possess historical objectivity to a playful, feminist subjectivity.

I apply a critical mythological approach to my work, striving to create an authentic process of arriving at new meaning by exploring how the dreaming process is relevant as a symbol moving between dreams and the daylight self. At first sight, my images seem simple. Often they are shadowed figures, carvings, and primitive drawings using acrylic mixed media and created on a wood support. I work, however, to reduce singular events to their essence, to amalgamate disparate elements and details in an effort to reveal their origins. I try to capture the way events might be perceived through a memory. Certain things maybe recalled and described in exquisite detail, but other information is forgotten, lost, or obscured.

Along with my struggle to maintain an intense degree of critical awareness of the broadening intellectual and cultural components of fine art, I am always reevaluating the significance of my work while determining what I can do more effectively. Artist in residency programs have been invaluable to my growth as an artist. I was selected for an exchange program in Hungary, an experience that influenced my life as well as my art. I had the opportunity to discover cultural imagery and native feminine archetypal characters. In this project, I made works that used local materials and influences. I collected soils and other fragments of nature through my travels and created pigments from these substances. In calling attention to these materials, I found beauty in the unfamiliar.

I look forward to enhancing my artistic development, both technically and aesthetically through questioning and improving my current painting practices. It is particularly important to me that I enhance my proficiency in handling the visual aspects of objects and imagery in my work in order to strike a balance between theoretical and narrative concerns.

I use sparse objects and symbols as my vocabulary, creating visual spaces to be reflected upon. The forms exist within the space of the painting; yet also allude to an outside source. The consequent interplay of familiarity and distance, and the tension this creates, is critical to my work. I believe my paintings have a sense of redemption. I strive to wield confident marks in strange, awkward rhythms as disparate and repetitive as the imagery. I struggle to tell narratives without succumbing to anything as linear as a single idea. My paintings could suggest sentimentality or nostalgia, but I hope the sum of the work never goes into that territory. These intimate views of figures at rest and play have resonance disproportionate to their shadows.

After having worked, traveled, and refined my voice as a young painter, I hope to be well versed in contemporary art and be able to apply this knowledge and practice to my paintings as a working artist. I am continuously working to develop my personal syntax of symbols, which become more reflective with each work I create. It is through the fusion of dream and waking, resolution and disintegration, which I strive to find an essential truth."

-Melissa Herrington