HRM Portfolio 2021
Scroll past the statement to view images. See image captions for details.
I specialize in abstract painting and drawing that features the interplay between intent and intuition, the convergence of choice and chance. I work in distinct series, each typically spanning years, with recurring themes of connectivity and resilience. My abiding interest in science and philosophy have led me to develop an artistic vocabulary and methods that push me past my assumptions about myself and the world in order to understand a bit more about both. Using this language of curiosity to recognize connections where I had barely sensed they existed is among the most thrilling and joyful aspects of what I do.
This selection of images is culled from different bodies of work from 2003 to the present. The techniques vary considerably, but whether I am blowing bubbles of ink through funnels and tubes, using palm frond “brushes”, or perhaps more conventional tools, all bear some relation to the intricacies and mysteries of the universe. Some pieces, like examples from my Eclipse Series, are direct in their references, others, like the pieces “Tidal Diamond” or “CelNav” (the Navy’s abbreviation for celestial navigation) are more implicit invitations to consider how we navigate through the world, just as the “drinking gourd” of the Big Dipper and the North Star helped escaped slaves find their way north to freedom. Circles and other shapes that recur in my work are often traced from dishes, cups, jars and common housewares, components of life’s simple domesticities holding their place in the consideration of the “immense what is,” that dance between continuity and uncertainty that pervades our interwoven existence.
The cosmos has instilled dreams and given me perspective as long as I can recall, from my first night sleeping in a true desert under the open sky, through decades of conversations with my father-in-law, an aerospace engineer who was intimately involved with NASA space programs of the 1960s including the Mercury Space Capsule and the Lunar Excursion Module (LEM).
Reviewing a solo exhibition of mine, Mark Daniel Cohen wrote, “Pape’s paper-and-ink technique is thus remarkably capable of conveying a sense of tangible mystery, of a heavy presence of the half of our world that is forever beyond precise conception but is ever close at hand. She sees and reveals the thing that is felt to be just over one’s shoulder, that is caught momentarily out of the corner of the eye, that is nearby until one looks straight at it and then isn’t there at all—the thing that comes only in inklings.”*
More than twenty years later, this description still feels true.
* Excerpted from Review Magazine, “Sky Pape, Inklings: Drawings at June Kelly Gallery,” by Mark Daniel Cohen, pp 8-10 (June, 1999)
