I’ve been exploring poetry as subject matter for my work.  When I read a beautiful poem, I feel that I have received a sacred gift, as though the poet is giving me a flower, directly from their heart to mine.  In creating a visual artwork from that poem, I wish to give a flower too…to you, my viewer.

This work was created using Emily Dickinson’s poem #1338, where the text itself (which is about a meadow) becomes organic growth.  First, I used the poem’s words to create a drawing on paper, which I then painted onto handwoven cloth.  In a process used in a lot of my work, the painted cloth is unwoven, causing the image to dissolve into dashes of paint on warp and weft thread.  When those threads are rewoven (separate from each other), they create two altered drawings, which imperfectly mirror each other.

Andrea Donnelly was born in 1982 in Wilmington, Delaware and currently lives in Richmond. She received her BA in Art and Design and a BS Psychology from North Carolina State University and her MFA in Fibers from Virginia Commonwealth University. Her work was included in the 2018 inaugural exhibition of Richmond’s Institute of Contemporary Art and she held a solo exhibition at the North Carolina Museum of Art in 2017. Her pieces are held in the collections of the North Carolina Museum of Art, The Federal Reserve and Capital One, both in Richmond, VA.

Barry Purcell creates altered perspectives in his deeply saturated photocollages. Capturing images directly from his travels, he communicates concepts deeply rooted in the moments each photograph was taken, recording the exact longitude and latitude and time, down to the second. Back in the studio, Purcell divides and rearranges a single image into various gridded patterns to reveal the latent visual patterns we often miss in nature. He states, “the fragmented images of my surroundings call attention to the beauty within the simple elements of nature: the subtle gradation of a sunset or the soft transition between the sky and sea. Although geometric and seemingly balanced by the human mind, each composition exists skewed, camouflaged by personal perspective, much like the debilitating effect we inflict on our reality.”

Purcell is a fourth-generation painter and photographer born in Virginia Beach, VA in 1973. He received his Bachelor of Science from James Madison University in 1996, Juris Doctorate and Master of Business from the University of Richmond in 2000. His work is included in the collections of Altus Realty, Washington, D.C., and Capital One in Richmond, VA. He currently resides in Richmond and Virginia Beach.

Leigh Suggs channels her fascination with the mystery and psychology of sight through cut paper works and large-scale installations. She obscures normal perception, manipulating her materials as if optical illusions. By cutting and weaving intricate patterns, she animates an array of materials, including reflective silver mylar, painted Yupo (a thick, plastic-based paper), and ink. Although two dimensional in nature, she transforms the works on paper into sculpture-like forms through her manipulation of shadows, applied color, and reflections. The individual is left to decipher the piece’s existence as sculpture or flatwork, illusion or concrete, much as Suggs’ practice continually asks “What am I really seeing?”.

Suggs was born in 1981 in North Carolina and currently resides in Richmond, VA. She received her BFA from University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill in 2003 and MFA in Craft and Material Studies from Virgin­ia Commonwealth University in 2015. She has mounted exhibitions at Reynolds Gallery, Quirk Gallery, and Anderson Gallery, all, Richmond, VA; LIGHT Art + Design, Chapel Hill, NC; The Contemporary Art Museum, Raleigh, NC; Weatherspoon Museum in Greensboro, NC; Racine Art Museum, Racine, WI; and The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, WI. Her work is held in the collections of Markel Corporation and Federal Reserve Bank in Richmond, and Fidelity Investments in Boston.