Home, Home on the Range
2001 Solo Show
Larsen Gallery

By Diana Lynn Thompson

As I talk with Patricia in the gallery, she shifts her feet so that she stands solidly on the floor. She tells me how important it is for her to be grounded, to have a sense of place. That recognition of her body in contact with the ground, an awareness of poise and weight, is essential to her person, and is found throughout her work. Wherever she is, and in whatever she does, her sense of belonging and her assured sense of composure permeate all she touches.

Patricia works with organic materials: clay, plaster, pigment. The gallery displays her sensuous paintings as well as her contemplative vases and bowls. Each piece is a brilliant counterpoint between sensitivity and force - too fragile and they would fall apart, too pushed and they would become overstated. They are each carefully thought through. Patricia's hands have moved and searched across the surface of her works with patience and curiosity, and with a belief in the power of accident - of finding something larger than her own self.

These works are lived, they breathe. Patricia places her drawn and scratched lines as if they were able to speak. And they do speak: of fragility and hope, of loss and song, of the long, multi-layered lives we lead. Even at her most playful, there's a feeling of a long reach, a hand held taut and then released, a hand pushed then reined in. In her search for balance between the fugitive and the fixed, she mixes the elegance of Zen with the slur of a skid-mark, the clean grace of line wit the rough pit of rust. Her marks move with a bodily knowledge of her medium: the dirt and land inherent in the plaster or clay, the moving gesture of life above.

Viewing her work you are aware of a feeling of absolute transport, a feeling like nothing else matters. The title of this exhibition is apt: you feel genuinely at home. You know that when Patricia created these pieces she was completely caught up in them, in full attendance. She was fully engaged, transported into the world she created as if travelling in time. The little girl in the dirt and grass meadow, a twist of rope in her hand, dreaming so vividly of riding horses that she makes them real.