Anne McKeown – Statement

I am involved in exploration, working with painting, printmaking, papermaking and wire drawings. My work contrasts rational, conceptual processes with intuitive inquiry. I research, investigate, and shape materials using chance, accident, and random samplings, as well as imagery from the canon of art history. I am driven to create work that is richly layered, that feels expressive, measured, and substantial, hopelessly existential. Wire drawings come from an interest in developing a lexicon of marks that evoke the language of today’s energy. I make and take apart systems. Using various scaled up and down drawings as guides, the handmade paper pieces and wire drawings are larger and smaller but always hold the information of image from the source. Imagery is freed from the substrate to hover and weave above and touch the wall. “stair to heaven”, is an example of my work with paper as a medium. My plan includes making similar sized and varied units that are stacked and interspersed. They are both intimate in scale and larger than human scale. All pieces are independent and variable.