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| Tawni Shuler Artist Statement |
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My paintings are an examination of my life experience. I am inspired by memories of growing up in rural Wyoming and being familiarized with life cycles: the birth, growth, death and decay at every level of organic life. As a child, I had the opportunity to explore both the beauty and the harshness transpiring within the landscape. I was able to pick up and study bones and remains of small animals, watch eggs hatch from a bird’s nest and observe the hunting season as deer carcasses were slung in the back of pickup trucks. My parents mainly raised cattle with the exception of a few pigs and horses on our farm. I was always called upon to help with the care of these animals. Sometimes this meant to help feed them, vaccinate them, deliver a calf, and sometimes it meant to help dispose of the carcass by carrying it off to the junkyard. The authenticity of my memory is subject to scrutiny, as I believe it is constantly changing, over time. In turn, my paintings reflect my evolving memories, linking past to present. The canvases portray slivers of accurate representations of past events as well as imagined and embellished counterparts. The suggestion of living and dead forms such as bones, hair, roots, grass, dirt, skin, etc. are features of the desert itself and are reminiscent of both the cycles of life and death. I paint these remembered elements to redefine a singular reality.
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By painting layer upon layer, using both opaque paint and transparent washes, my process is similar to the way memory functions. Using these layers, I can recall the way the mind orders specifics by pushing the less important elements to the hazy background and bringing the more important features to the foreground. The canvases mimic my ever-changing memory, with imagery that seems to move through space and time; images come forward and recede, some clearly, others obscurely. Thus, the canvas becomes the setting for imagery that is balanced between abstraction and representation, sharp or blurred, internal or external. I also employ the use of mixed media such as shellac, dirt, casein paint, and actual artifacts from nature such as leaves, seeds, and deer hair to recall certain memories and create certain textures. I utilize processes that are difficult to control such as pouring, dripping, scraping, sanding, and the spraying of paint, shellac, powdered graphite, and polyurethane. In employing some of these more unpredictable processes, I relate back to the way one is unable to control all aspects of remembering. It is important to evoke the atmosphere of revisiting a memory to allow the viewer to make conclusions about the structure of memory as the foundation of identity and their role in these continuous cycles of life and death.
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