Artist Statement – Groundless  

Elizabeth Snipes-Rochester 

 

In my experience, painting is an encounter with urgency - a desperate act and attempt to grasp the present with every mark. It is a way of indulging in the here and now while daring to lean into the fundamental uncertainty of what is to come. I find that the creative process is akin to the human and mothering process. With each process, fundamental uncertainty is the only certain thing. To paint, live and mother is to experience an ongoing process of groundlessness, especially as circumstances change, hard decisions are made, consequences emerge, and the world continues to impose its own challenging parameters. With the Groundless series, I consider for the first time ever, my individual experience as a mother of two young children during the era of the COVID-19 pandemic.  

 

I approach painting and drawing as a tactile and responsive act. While the subject of the figure is my formal starting point, it is also a conceptual vehicle with which I can associate my individual experience. These associations translate into spatial, chromatic, and linear choices - becoming metaphors for vulnerability, relationship, strength, loss, self-perception, and curiosity. Colors are chosen deliberately based on their chromatic and spatial relationships, and in some cases, based on the pigments’ toxicity. Metal leaf appears for the first time in these works as non-spatial, non-representational passages that complicate typically resolved figure/ground relationships.