Artist: Laine Justice

Title: Kitten Bird Clouds | Pink Sky

Medium: Watercolor and ink on hot press paper

Dimensions: 22 X 30 in

From the artist's statement: "I am an intuitive maker working in painting, textiles, bookmaking, and more. Markmaking over extended periods of time, I create sculpted, emotive animal landscapes. Composed of overlayed creatures shifting identity and form, marks and hybrid animals push and pull to recenter us while we recenter them back into landscape, or further into abstraction. Raw pigment, drawing and impasto combined with spectral materials like mini glass mosaic, give surfaces sheen and texture that bounce animals back and forth between conflicting visual planes, creating image within image. ?Pareidolia is the concept we are all so familiar with: staring up at the sky, searching, and finding a familiar shape in the clouds. Even though it's autonomous we often ask someone, do you see that too? My work explores these these imaginative, elusive spaces and their intersection with our sense of place and self. The spirit of the wild, ecological world with our human, emotional worlds, passing through the personal lens of trauma and disability. The role of curiosity and play which provides endless possibilities, questions, and answers as we relate to ourselves and each other is ever present in my work: always asking, "I'm right here" and "what do you see?"."