Connect the Dots

New Encaustic Works by Paula Roland

Artist's Statement

New Mexico, with its proximity to big science, art, and spirituality, is a nexus for the exploration of the unknown. Living here has heightened my interest in chaos and complexity theory. This culture of science resides alongside Native American spirituality, Hispanic Catholicism, Buddhism, and New Age belief, among others. Matter and spirit seem to merge in quantum physics and set the conditions for a poeticized science , an arena for ideas that emerge intuitively in my work.

These encaustic paintings relate to systems and suggest ecology, travel, weather, populations, politics, and interactions between humans and the natural world. The language of repetitive mark-making is a record of experience or attitude that suggests a narrative as the marks flow, disperse, gather, interact, and personify social interactions.

Encaustic is an ancient and stable painting medium. Beeswax, pigment and resin hardener is painted and fused with heat, incised, and otherwise manipulated to create images. In some works, heavy handmade paper is dipped repeatedly in a bath of white encaustic. This becomes a strong and rigid tablet for the images. Powdered graphite and alcohol are painted onto the white surface. Drawing combines with painting as additional marks are made through incising the wax and using graphite drawing and image transfer.

These works merge drawing and painting through an evolution of ideas, process and materials that have a deeper source in growing up on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi and New Orleans, and from an earlier Hurricane Series from the 1980's. I want these works to encourage thought, emotion and action. Complex systems (among them art) provide many relationships to be explored. It is for the viewer to Connect the Dots.

Paula Maenza Roland

July, 2008