P.K.Frizzell

   artist's statement

   My work has been about looking inside: into the nature of our minds and bodies. In this work I'm looking inside by looking through shadows onto material in order to explore the intersection of the intangible and the material. Most of what is essential about human existence is the intangible: love, inspiration, thoughts, spirituality, ideas, hope, transcendence, etc. We consist of the intersection of these intangibles and our material bodies. In this work, I use the shadow to explore this convergence. The shadow is nothing, not even light, yet it is evidence of a material presence. I find tremendous beauty in the way shadows interact with material. The surfaces I create look the way they do because I'm interested in the way that materials which have been "brutalized" (clay in the fire of the kiln, dirt and plants torn apart by floodplains, urban decay, etc.) look so beautiful to me. I work these surfaces until they contain a history. I flood them with paint over studio detritus, or imitate the effects of fire, decay or age. I then overlay them with shadows in a way that the nothing of the shadow and the something of the surface become one .

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"... the content of the "Shadow Paintings" comes as much from the rich, layered ground that she creates for each one as from the allusion to some kind of life made by the fleeting grayish image of a bird, a figure, a dog, a jar, that floats above it.
The shadow is actually printed on transparent material that literally floats over this ground, creating a slight, ghostly dimensionality."

-- excerpted from Me and My Shadow by Maria Porges