Audrey T. Welch

                                                               ARTIST STATEMENT

I construct process-based abstract paintings that speak to our need to make authentic connections.  Rooted in my Sicilian immigrant culture and impacted by living fifteen years overseas, my paintings map personal history, and inter-relational dynamics of family and culture.

Source material to generate my work often includes maps.  For me, the possibility that maps call forth is not a literal reference to place but a poetic space of possibility.  I am attracted to the diagrammatic quality of maps that unite us with the intangible and the elusive past and present.

Working within a set of radical layering strategies, my process favors improvisation, chance, and intuitive risk-taking. I layer fluid acrylic paint, photographic imagery, tape, and plaster on canvas using a physical body-centered approach. Plaster and masking fluid are applied like a skin that overlays and conceals underlying brush marks. My methods are both additive and subtractive, excavating layers of applied paint and plaster to reach the work’s final state.

Ultimately, I aim to distill ordinary experience into an abstract language steeped in sensuousness, metaphor and mystery – to capture the capacity of the human spirit to transform and to endure.