Pamela Drix

Paras on Art and Life

From time to time, the right words and thoughts rise to the surface. Here you will find short paragraphs on various thoughts on contemporary practice, politics, cultural events, and other ruminations.

Longer version of my artist statement:

My experience of landscape is all about edges. My work navigates difference and relation. Edges, traces, and shifting perspectives complicate space, making fragile ecosystems. Consider--the space between “this and not that’, the prayer sent to loved ones, the edge between two thoughts, the edge between two hands touching, or the sun rising over the horizon. I wish to understand this relational exchange and find a place to sit with it. There lies transformation. Beautiful monsters and shared horizons result.

In the mix, my work ponders psychology, ecology, geography, perception, navigation, phenomenology, mapmaking, architecture, geometry, biology, growth patterns, and crystallography.  Landscape presents a broad context in which to explore place, as internal and external experience. I explore these issues through abstraction and formal context.

Materiality and touch are embedded in the work.  Simultaneous contradictions -- glossy/matte, floating/heavy, textured/smooth, organic/inorganic, animate/inert, hard/soft -- allude to experience of the world in a direct way.  Like the “skin” of our experience, the nature of the work is fragile, which at times seeks grounding, sometimes with thread or layered masses. It also embraces vulnerability through its fragmentary, disparate presentation. 

In a collage aesthetic, this process registers the gestural mark and the pressure of the etching press to capture movement, directionality, or physical contact.  Fragmentary origins of mark-making in drypoint, planographic monoprints, residual ink on matrices, and ink drawings on vellum—become elements in the work.   These formal residuals of process integrate layers that are opaque, translucent, or transparent.

Maureen Dowd has written this great article about the January 6 commission. We are at a crossroads in this country. The opportunity we have to call a monster a monster, contextualize and understand the dynamics at play, and make decisions about next steps—is the beauty I see in such analysis. My current work is very much finding the potential for positive change in the face of monstrosity. Oddly, I thank Trump, (and other pathological narcissists I know in my life), for the opportunity to see where I stand. I find beauty in that.

Dark Waters 1 and 2 are based on a dream about navigating forces without distinct borders or edges. Exercises such as these map territory that we cannot see. The felt experience is real and our dreams bring out the realities of the dynamic in beautiful ways. I consider these beautiful monsters too, for they give us the opportunity to find strength in vulnerability.

I have "finished" 25 new pieces but have no sense of accomplishment. Yesterday, I ripped out 438 pages from the first novel ever written, entitled Pamela, while I was watching a wonderful talk at Williams College about Sol Lewitt prints focusing on the print strategies of reversal and rotation. The torn pages are folded all differently, a pile waiting to be used in some way. I feel in some way that this ripping of pages (perhaps all aspects of myself) from the spine of the book and random folding of so many pages begins to show complications of identity, process, and extra dimensionality to one's sense of self. The internal spaces and reformation taking place within those spaces, the textual overlays and planer juxtapositions create untidiness. The pile is my life.

The struggles of inner and outer worlds coalesce in liminal spaces.  Two dimensions wander into three dimensions and back again.  My sense of self navigates the untidiness of these ambiguities.  Edges, traces, shifting perspectives play across space, making fragile ecosystems that elude clear definition.

I am watching the leaves falling off the trees this morning. The golden brilliance of them, releasing from their branch, floating so gracefully down dancing as that go and then resting on the ground in all their glory. I want to go like that.

Thinking through arrangements in the studio today. Shifts and traces include 48 cyanotypes with white litho ink monoprinted shapes, creating a mysterious blue halo color. Residual traces play in the dark recesses. Our world is made from such constructions. It is a world seen through edges.

Lviv, Ukraine. This image was posted in the NYT in an article by Carlotta Call. The city was my father-in-law;’s home, and has now become the lifeline of refugees leaving the country, and for supplies coming in for those who are fighting for their nation. I sit comfortably in my living room, trying to imagine the human toll this is taking on everyone there, and wondering what my dear Papa would think and do if he witnessed this. Edges, boundaries are fluid constructs. My work ponders these issues.

An open society that permits difference is the best vaccine against monoculture.

Mother’s Day always brings mixed emotions for me. My mother Evelyn was a brilliant but troubled woman. Mothering for her was stabilizing, as her twins (myself and my twin sister) provided a strong counterpoint to her early rape and substance abuse that plagued her the rest of her life. She struggled with addiction and shame, and anger that came with being held down my circumstances beyond her control. It was my mother-in-law, a Holocaust survivor, whose grace and kindness nurtured and guided me as a young mother myself. We have different kinds of mothers who teach us, nurture us, ground us. There is not saccharine tributes here. Just a profoundly grateful acknowledgement that mothers are the key to our future, to the children they bear. We mothers are part of a great sisterhood for which I am so deeply humbled and proud.

I remember seeing Scully's prints in NYC some years back and fell in love with them. His paintings from the 80s are so fantastic. He continues to interrogate the grid as a structure, but it is really about space, the pictorial field, and now more about tone and imbuing space with poetic resonance. The modernist thread continues in his work, adding irregularity, opticality, nuance, and rhythms of the eye. They are beautiful constructions of states of mind--something that intrigues me now about the potentialities of abstraction.

This way, then. The direction my work is presently going ponders this attitude. It entices the difference between space and time, holding the comma as a place of liminal connection. In language, as in our experience, the place of our sense of self, is held in between, an edge of this and that. But the phrase “this way,then” is also an invitation, a manner of sharing the journey, open to what comes next. We are all travelers.

The agoric spaces of the internet are fraught with masked identities, unsatiated needs, market volatility, narrated stories, with all the inundation of images and information. I fear it and I am in awe of it. It is another form of the sublime. Another beautiful monster.

Ecosystems contain variety and contradictions, flows and energic directions. They are heterotopic in this sense. Inherent contradictions are endemic to these hybrid spaces: transparecy/opacity, matte/glossy, here/there, heavy/floating, micro/macro scales. Difference catalyzes the conversation.

Recognizing complications, including cultural, social, geographical, historic circumstances, in the environment in which we live, the impulse is to make sense of them as cohesive forms with edges, with which we can carve out our position and identity. Navigating complexity befalls us all. It is how we negotiate, assemble, give form and consequently find understanding in the midst of those complications that renders sense. Here the inner world of our lived selves intersect lived experience. The skin of our consciousness is the very bodies we inhabit and explore the world. I am a phenomenologist at heart.

Working in the studio is sometimes like being a beetle. I meander and lay bare the process of construction, in the fragile way in which life finds a way, leaving traces of movement, purpose, and sustenance. Images coalesce the flow of it all. Blue tape temporarily holds it all together. We are one step away from undoing. Life is like that.

Meanders. The bark beetle has taught me something about finding place. The symbiotic relationship between myself and the world exists because life makes it so. Like the beetle, I have earned a hardened shell, to carry the load of experience upon my back. The space seems narrow and my efforts inconsequential, but what a beautiful line I make. Metamorphosis takes on many forms.

Earth Day: We climb up a foot path leading to a hilly pasture, with volumes of grass on either side of us. We rise up on the left breast to the apex where pasture meets forest at the margin between clear and dense. It is when the sky is bright but cloudy with oncoming storm, wind blowing, and crows speak their language. We assemble. To the north we see the words STOLEN among the trees. To the south, the word MARGINAL is written with barbed wire strung across the abyss between two trees. WOUNDED is written upon a stone flat on the ground. These are the owner’s Ben Altman’s interventions. Oneida Turtle clan poet Kenzie Allen rises to the log laid down to mark a station for her oratory. Two deer appear behind her watching from the forest. She cries. A second poet Kayssiniyo Kick rises from the ground and orients to the station point, the axis mundi, removing her shoes to feel the earth beneath her. She is Mohawk Wolf clan. Tall and proud. The generational trauma impacts her passionate language and we are their witness. We are moved in the hushed silence following her performance.

Difference. In looking at edges, difference distinquishes between things. Relationship enters the equation in the “betweeness”. Sharp edges, blurred edges, tonal nuance, changes in flow or speed, all mark difference. Communication, transformation, changed status result. I wonder if this is part of the theory of everything. And further, when does difference lead to dissolution, when the extent of difference catalyses into chaos? That must be part of everything too.

At the center of my life is lack, an insatiable vacuity, full in its depth and breadth— a contradiction, also another kind of difference. It is an odd recognition that life seeks resolution and fullness of being because it needs to as an itinerant hope. Maybe that is not a nothing.

The center of the edge. Within the sphere of a life, edges continue to play across experience, a delicate balance to navigate existential situations. It is a dance of the brave-hearted, the kind-hearted, the ever hopeful.

Having been a panelist for NYFA reviewing over a 1000 artists’ works, it is humbling and inspiring to see the creative efforts of so many. The creative act sparks realization that perception is uniquely individual and global, each a center of the edges of their worlds, making rich the life of this planet.

Life is precious. The maple trees are tinged with shades of orange and red this time of year, dropping their helicopter progeny with abundance upon the driveway, a litter of profuse optimism. What life gives and what it takes away present powers beyond our human control. I am struck by these formidable energies. I wonder whether human wars can suspend and let go like the leaves and seeds of the maple tree. We might all benefit by that simple lesson.

At the core of my work is the alterity of differance, with the Derridian “a”. I am a fraternal twin and have grown to understand that we are both same and different at the same time. My life is circumscribed by navigating the relationship between what I know and what I do not know. My twin continues to show me that differance is a way of being that acknowledges a movement between us that is unseen but felt at all times. What I know about her is not static. What I do not know about her is also not static. Otherness poses the opportunity to find relation in the space between. Betweeness is the essence of being a twin.

The modernist notion that time has discreet epochs doesn’t fit with my thinking about place, where like Robert Smithson, geologic time spans different scales and implies movement. The bark beetle graphic line made into wood invites introspection on the nature of place, and encapsulates the intimate syntax of beings engaging with the environment. Embodiment is a dance between life and death that unfolds moment by moment. The event horizon, even on the scale of the habitat of the bark beetle, is a poetic exposition on circumstance, hope, language, and material.

Mental spaces are nebulous but felt, a perceptive field that moves between thoughts. Endless edges that want to de-differentiate into new narratives. Thought is movement. I want to capture all of it.

I hear the Canadian geese fly overhead, the sky dense with a grey fog. The resemblance to the work of Dawoud Bey’s haunting portrayal of the site-based slave trail images is apropro. Flights to freedom requirsd darkness and obfuscation. To be hunted is not a voluntary condition. Migratory birds do not have fear, but do have a similar need to survive. We share this breathing planet, which holds us in these moments of movement, in escape and for life. Life seeks continuance.

The creative life can include motherhood in a continuum of ways. I admit that as a mother and creative, Patti Smith's attitude resonates. I was always a creative, before, during, and after raising my boys. I chose motherhood, in my 30's, which continues to enrich my life in so many ways, The porousness between motherhood and creative labor unfolds daily. The arc of one's life finds balance, like the horizon.

On this last day of my residency at VCCA, I am watching turkey vultures sweep the sky over the kudzu that hides their prey. It is a sense of desire I wish to capture of this elegant dance. We all seek fulfillment. VCCA has done that for me.

My experience of landscape is all about edges. My work navigates difference and relation by examining the role of edges. My sense of the world reveals an untidiness of being, internal and external. Edges, traces, and shifting perspectives complicate space, making fragile ecosystems. Consider--the space between “this and not that’, the prayer sent to loved ones, the edge between two thoughts, the edge between two hands touching, or the sun rising over the horizon. I wish to understand this relational exchange and find a place to sit with it. There lies transformation. Beautiful Monsters, a series addressing complexity and difference, reflect the tensions of our encounter with complexity, seeking shared horizons.

I wish to continue a series of prints/drawings exploring the center of edges, to identify sources of tension or disconnect, to ultimately find visual ways for exchange at the center of difference.  In an environment in which discord is playing out in politics, social relationships, and in the media, I want to find the lines and spaces of relation. 

Using abstraction as a strategy to address difference and relation, my current work utilizes geometric form, textural references from natural forms and materials, along with topography, geography, and social/cultural/psychological events as I find them.  The spatial experience, as extracted from my senses, is a bodily engagement with the internal and exterior factors in every moment in time. 

Through the exploration of materials, process, and form, combining print media, drawing, and painting, I utilize a collage aesthetic and modular assembly to record the traces of the landscape.  I re-present the landscape as revealed edges, with contours, textures, and organic shapes. I build crystallized ecosystems, part by part, with all the traces, palimpsests, and impressions that unfold.  The process will dictate the ultimate form of this work. 

Recent work at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts explores some of these ideas in the Lessons from the Bark Beetle series.  Edges of firewood, of bark beetle meanders carved into the surface of the wood, of wood grain with its linear patterns and growth rings, render an ecosystem in which life forms move and operate.  Transfer relief prints, combined with painted meanders and folded pages from the first English novel Pamela, reveal my constructed world as an echo that mimics an ecosystem. 

Back in the studio, sitting on the edge of unknowing.

10 Propositions:

1. Skepticism is a place of edges.

2. Palimpsests exist as part of history.

3. Life is a form of continuance.

4. Geometry is both a constitutional element of origins and a natural extension of contingencies.

5. Landscape is a continuum.

6. Perception is an active projection.

7. Breathing is an edge activity.

8. Edges as limits, margins, or frames are transitional.

9. Language operates on many levels, in clusters, in redactions, as flow, and with syntax. Not always legibly.

10. The place of the heart meeting the mind is the edge where understanding sits.

“Whiteness is the site of privileged imagining, the invisible standard.”—p. 19 quote by Patricia J. Williams in White: Whiteness and Race in Contemporary Art by Maurice Berger. In contemplating this sentence, my recent finished installation Lessons of the Bark Beetle, investigates this invisibility, wrestling with what my landscape does not visibly provide. A grid system inherently structures how I as a white woman navigate Haudenosaunee territory after the military tracts were designated. The intersection of human history and visual landscape provides layers of complexity full of simultaneous revelations and obscurations.

The Lessons from the Batk Beetle installation explores the dynamic interplay of edges in landscape, manifesting a messy map of contingent forces and forms.  Different scales and de-differentiations of forms that mimic each other  provide perspective.  Edges expresse the limit or continuance of life. Asemic graphism, exemplified by the meander,  reveals a landscape as a layered story about colonial history, psychology, geometry, mathematical principles, topography, geography, and space as white invisibility.  Literary “paper bodies” offer another kind of meandering -- a search for growth and transformation that flirt on the edge. The transfiguration from firewood and bark beetle traces relocates to a site that registers their mark, steeped in the complexity of human construction and wanderings/wonderings.

Firewood Zips explores an ecosystem in which the bark beetle meanders confront edges in all directions. The indexical transmutation of the unique graphic line of these bark beetle traces record their life history, guided by the need for sustenance and continuance on the edge of possible life afforded them.  The intricacy of this ecosystem, amplified to a dizzying extent, intends to decenter our attention in order to locate ourselves within a larger, dynamic system of which we are only a small part.  It is complex and fragile at the same time.

Language and text provide a backdrop or a layer of information that is both ubiquitous and unseen, much like the landscape itself. My interest in literature and in the landscape plays central roles in my perception. My engagement with materials and ideas results in a haptic experience of now, though movement destabilizes the form.

My practice is a restless one. A push and pull inherent in perception manifests between seeking orientation and seeing edges that imply sameness and difference.  Landscape does not become the refuge but is a place where I inhabit complexity.  Through meanders, composites, assembly, I find place to be a momentary positioning of disparate states of being.  I do not settle into one direction.  It is always multi-faceted.  Unsettled.

My practice has evolved broadly from representation to abstraction, from landscape as subject to landscape as experienced.  Topography, psychology, ecology, sustainability, cartography, geometry, and networks take a more central role now in the forms and unseen tensions that I perceive in the landscape. My practice has become more mutable, blending qualities that draw out distinctive surfaces and edges.

Rereading Robert Smithson recently, I remain in awe of his insightful awareness of the complexity of landscape, our experience of it, the mystery of it, of our role in its perception. As I was walking along the bike path of Providence’s Narragansett Bay (named after the indigenous tribe who lived here long before colonial times), the juxtaposition of windmills, large storage facilities, cranes, and cargo ships visually collide with all the shore birds (swans, geese, loons, mallards, herons, egrets), movement of the tides, the creatures of the margins (deer, shrews, fox, coyote), I witness the incredible contradictions that I see. It is an industrial sublime measured by straight edges and points being held “at bay” against the forces of nature that march on. Let us not be fooled by its quietude and beauty. Our bodies share this ecotone. We abide by greater rules than we can see or control.

Summary of the Lessons of the Bark Beetle:

Lesson #1  Ecology and psychology are interrelated concepts.  I investigate the ecology of mind, and mindfulness of ecology.

Lesson #2  Traces of existence can be seen in the positive or in the negative. Either way, movement and flow are present.

Lesson #3  Meanders of the mind and the bark beetle follow an instinctual path, searching, digesting, and growing as a result.

Lesson #4  Changing a narrative involves transformation of some kind, including jumping dimensions, scale, and time.

Lesson #5 All change involves process, patience, innate abilities, and awareness of edges, crossing or making boundaries if necessary.

Lesson #6 Not all can be seen at once.  Some things remain obscured or hidden, but some palimpsests remain.  Many modalities are needed to understand complex things.

Strategies for evolution of form: reversal, iteration, sampling, blending, overlapping, transfer, rubbing, tracing, printing, scratching, rotation, movement, transition, montage, overlapping, fading, intersectionalities, episodic spacing, shadowing, marking, waving. All of these help execute shape-shifting. Attention to object or to space designates the flow of mind to embody the forms. Nature follows these patterns.

Collemacchia Meander is nearing completion. One hundred feet of exploring the idea of meander as a function of place-making. The journey reveals itself through glimpses, vignettes, episodes in which a presence of vines, fences, and their combination, interact with “organic line”, Lygia Clark’s notion of the presence of space that occurs between things. The meander takes place in these spaces, whereas the glimpses of form dot the page as fragments of experience. Much like our consciousness, these impressions come and go, of different value, scale, density. Different patterns emerge. Pausing is prompted with a locational sign, providing a moment in time to reflect. It is the meeting of perception andconsciousness.

Below is video I created for the Considered Forms exhibit at South Hill Business Campus Gallery opening in March 2025. The six pieces in this group show all address issues of place-making, including perception, psychology, history, topography, and locating oneself in the world.

Art is an existential activity, giving attention to the vagaries and aspirations of living.

I am an older woman now with sagging skin, blotched and fallible, naturally tattooed by time and experience. My skin declares its history. This vulnerable surface continues to protect life though—a precious edge between self and the world in which I inhabit.  Such edges are liminal spaces, transitional in nature.  As such, my concerns are existential.  Edges are a primary condition of life, which I consciously accept. They have a life-giving function. Landscapes of all kinds—psychological, biological, historical, political, philosophical, topological—teem with edges that help to distinguish and to connect. Transformation lies there. My work explores this.

I fell last week, twisting the left ankle on an uneven sidewalk in front of a busy coffee shop. Falling is never planned. It was an ugly spectacle, messy, inconvenient. Three young women came to my rescue, lifting me up from the horizontal to the vertical. I located my feet and stood as best as I could, noting that nothing was broken. The dimensions of orientation were intact. How lucky to be aware of the relation between movement and stasis.

The creative process is in large part about building a vessel—a structure that gives shape to an intention of accepting, holding, and pouring forth. In order to hold water, this vessel must exist as a precondition, though often fragile and made from fragments of self that permit uncertainly and the unknown. Once built, this vessel is the means by which the flow of new ideas comes forth, a waiting for something to be born, manifested, given life. I have made such a vessel, held closely to my heart, one that I have tried to nurture over these seventy years.

Anna Atkins cyanotypes are the prototype for this series to explore the idea of the index. Light renders the form as a physical translation. The distinctive blue of the cyanotype is a signifier and used here as a translating device to address the transformational possibilities of matter. The image is a constellation of perception, indexical process, physical properties, and energy transfer. Unlike Atkin’s natural specimens, I instead employ ink drawings on vellum from locations in Italy, Germany and France. These ink drawings are then used as my specimens, exposing them often more than once in layered exposures.  Patterns become broken, and new patterns arise as a result.

In some cases, I further complicate the cyanotype to register other layers of materiality--to make denser, to reveal energy lines and  other congealed marks that populate space. These added marks activate the skin of the image, giving a nod to the serial passage of time. The image is born out of these moments of attention. Complexity, haptic surfaces, radiance, depth and movement emerge out the blue, literally. Line penetrates every aspect of the surface typography.

In the intersections of vines and fences, I found a new language of glyphs or morphemes, that constellate space, much like waterlilies in the River Naab. The meander and intersecting lines evolved into a visual shorthand through a process of distillation and refinement. These morphemes appear and disappear, some float to the surface, some dive deeper into dark blue.  Nature reveals and conceals.  Sometimes messages remain murky.