Elisabeth Condon/photo credit Phillip Reed

ARTIST STATEMENT: My paintings are two-dimensional translations of landscape, intersecting nature and décor. They take inspiration from Chinese scrolls and the wallpapers and textiles of my childhood home.

Scrolls sojourn through landscapes, imparting the social and political conditions of their time through imagery and how it is painted. The wallpapers I reference are lattice and plant patterns from the 1960s and 1970s, a period in 20th century America when the dissonance between a strict religious upbringing and feminism, sexual liberation, and anti-war protest fragmented a unified whole. In the boundless traditions of abstraction expressionism, color field painting, and scrolls, I find space to integrate these disparities.

In 2020 I became obsessed with lattice, practicing it repeatedly to create a body memory in a process related to ink and brush painting. I wanted to warp and upend geometry. Reweaving lattice focused the pressure and liquidity of my gestures. The space between lines became compositional building blocks that flicker like light between branches or buildings, demarcating space like a map where those things would be.