Mary Pat Turner

Finn and Forest Friends was painted while I was pregnant with my son, Finnian. I imagined a safe place for him that felt nestled and whole. Through this pregnancy I watched as two birds built their nest next to my home studio window. The nest would be destroyed and the birds would rebuild. Over and over I watched the birds rebuild. It was sad and peaceful, and I felt for them.

Finn’s first sentence, “The bird, it flies!” was exclaimed as he pointed at the painting now named for this event.

Sibyl was a painting that came together simply, during my pregnancy with her. It was made as a demonstration for my students on intuitive expressive painting.

The night I realized Sibyl wasn’t moving, it was after a day of teaching these same women. I instructed from a rolling chair, and we showed care for each other. They knew I had been told to rest by the doctor, when I twice reported my belief that something was wrong. It was difficult to go back to teaching after Sibyl died. I returned to the classroom, and some wanted to share in my grief. I spoke with them and felt the weight of their experiences, but my mind was moving through mud. I couldn’t cry for myself or them. I repeated the same words to everyone’s questions, and that took me farther from myself.

I want these human experiences to be shared and normalized, while recognizing each experience belongs to an individual. I now study and practice ways I can do this that lessen shame, emotional labor, and isolation.

When I made Ari and Sibyl I felt convinced that I needed this painting as a relic from pregnancy with Ari, in case he also died.

Making Sense of the World came long after Ari’s birth. We moved from Ohio to Rhode Island fueled by deep undeniable intuition. The members of my family have many struggles, but I know that we are in the right place for growth and dreams.

When I am preoccupied by abjection, I build fantastic scenarios taking bits and pieces from nature and placing them within amorphous packed spaces.  I explore how body identity is shaped by the systems we are part of, and the resulting internal conflict is represented by physical scenarios in these paintings.  

artist statement

Inspired by Julia Kristeva’s definition of abjection as our “reaction to a threatened breakdown in meaning, caused by the loss of a distinction between subject and object or between Self and Other,” my paintings investigate a collapse in distinction between perceived boundaries.  I interpret this concept by borrowing symbols from multiple image sources and collaging them into nebulous environments. Most often these symbols are chosen from the animal and plant kingdoms or relate to food, and are arranged into non-linear narratives.  Each “story” is a fantastic mirror, reflecting image as illusion and image as medium, flexible to distortion and manipulation.  These paintings relate as much to gesture or expression as they do to representing images from life.  My intention is to create paintings that become a middle ground between the physical world and the psyche, by shaping a location where viewers are confronted with a breakdown of boundaries.  These works implicate boundaries that exist between what a thing is and is not, what sustains and destroys a system, assimilation versus expulsion, and other dichotomous relationships that exist as part of our human identity.  The constant flux of visual information within each painting encompasses viewers in scenes that feel massive and vulnerable to self-destruction.  The experience integrates audiences into a parasitic system of growth and deterioration, possibly reflecting their own co-dependant relationships and facets of identity. 

*Kristeva, Julia, and Leon S. Roudiez. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. New York: Columbia UP, 1982. Print.

Mother started as a study in codependent relationships and the transmission of trauma. I used umbilical cords, strangler trees, and worms as reference sources. A strangler tree wraps itself around a host tree, eventually blocking out the sunlight and killing it. I worked into my system of trees three vaginal frames that house pictures of my mom, biological mother, and the Virgin Mother Mary. The photographs felt unsettlingly confrontational and static. I painted them out in an act that felt like personal agency.

Sixteen years later, I became a mother to the first of two sons. My daughter was stillborn, because her umbilical cord had absences of protective jelly. During labor, I had a vision of her as a warm light glowing behind trees, soothing me. She felt like, what I imagine is, a mother’s intimate knowing.

I learned strangler trees protect their hosts in hostile conditions before the hosts are subsumed. Their figs feed more than 1,200 species of birds and mammals year round, and these mammals go on to spread the seeds of thousands of other tree species. The story of the strangler tree is of symbiosis.

These acrylic paintings are inspired by the color fields and gesture paintings of Abstract Expressionism.  Originally, I was affected by astronomy magazines and Christian imagery from 15thc.-17thc.

Artist Statement

When asked about my action paintings and color fields, I have been adamant in talking about them as a study in materials. When I approached this kind of work my focus had been on observing the physical properties of paint, color, the surfaces I worked on, and exploring the ways my body could use tools to explore materiality. I was interested in large flat surfaces that took up my range of sight, and often mimicked the dimensions of my body. I started with color fields. Each painting was made with many applications of thin acrylic paint that I called “veils”. I wanted each painting to resonate from afar as one monochromatic pulse, but have depth and range of color in closer proximity. I wanted to feel like I was inhabiting each painting, the way I do when I make them.

The color fields were made on canvas stretched over self-built frames and found doors. I would use industrial and fine art brushes in scrubbing and sweeping movements switching from hand to hand. My paint was a mix of collected interior house paint and artist grade acrylics, and both types of acrylic had specific roles in creating compositional space and movement. With house paint, I would drip, flow, and spend long hours waiting to see what would happen based on experience, environmental variables, and chance. Artist grade acrylics dry quickly, were applied with techniques that had more certain results, and were used for high pigmented quality. I took rotary sanders to wood panels in scrolls like language.

The artwork increasingly tested my own physical boundaries as I began to work at predawn hours, surrounding myself with two to four paintings at once. I would leave my body to inhabit the bodies surrounding me, but I was also making them. I was vigorously active, and yet it wouldn’t be until hours later that I would feel my own body’s needs. It was like coming back into myself. I saw this state as Sublime, and wanted to reach it each time. I convinced myself that denying my body of its needs through the day honed me for this process. I did not recognize that my body holds a history of abuse. I didn’t think that maybe this was a form of dissociation, or that possibly I could enter into this type of art making as a healthy act of agency. I didn’t have these words. I was using a certain level of asceticism as a way to feel safer.

I apologize that images of the earlier works are poor quality. I have no way of reshooting them, as most were sold or became new paintings. I need to include a few of them, because they are the essential beginning to the way I work.