ABOUT
ARTIST'S STATEMENT
I work primarily in drawings and installations. In my drawings objects, faces, and animals appear out of seeming nothingness, often to my own surprise. Space itself becomes a material alongside pastels, oil sticks, graphite, ink, wax, and heavy weight papers. I love line, depth, the mystery of black, and the intermingling of opposites. I listen to a wide range of music while I work, from blues to Shostakovich, and find that the music often becomes a muse. A drawing can become a visual representation of a particular piece of music, as in the drawings evoked by Bach’s Suites for Cello and Yo-Yo Ma’s Silk Road Ensemble.
The installations often entail using fabric, sometimes wrapping branches. At times I have also added three dimensional elements-picture frames to explore how we “frame” and thereby create our experiences, recycled prunings from blackberry bushes, old china cups and tiny sculptures of beds that perched on the silk wrapped tree branches. My work with fabric was originally inspired many years ago by my discovery of Japanese Shinto shrines in which sacred rocks or trees are accented with cloth to acknowledge their living quality.
Beauty, Landscape, Space and Silence in all their range and ambiguity are sustaining forces in my work.
MICA KNAPP | ARTIST
I have a BA degree in literature from Bennington College, a diploma in fine arts from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and a Masters of Divinity from Andover Newton Theological School. Most recently I was a chaplain and incorporated art in my way of working. I have continued my arts education over the past ten years at Montserrat College of Art in Beverly, MA, studying with Tim Hawksworth and Lala Zeitlyn, and at Earth Dance Retreat Center in Plainfield, MA, where I explored dance improvisation. Currently I work in my studio at ArtSpace in Maynard, MA, doing mixed media drawings and planning future installations.
