Biography
PAULA ROLAND
Navigating, 2014
Although I live in the desert, this series of encaustic monotypes and monoprints, Navigating, has its origins in my childhood on the Gulf of Mexico. Navigating manifests the dual identities of that watery terrain, twin strands of my artistic DNA: wildness and calm. Directly in front of our home lay the usually placid Gulf, which runs through Navigation with a quiet, almost minimal voice. Behind the house were swampy woods, forbidden, and yet my favorite place to play. They are ever present as the complex, unexplained forces that I allow to enter the dance of creating the work.
Growing up on the Gulf meant being attuned to weather’s turbulent incursions in our lives. Like the Gulf, Navigating has its own changeable weather; what on one scale might be a system susceptible to scientific explanation becomes nature’s unpredictable and unknowable chaos at another, including the shifts that threaten to return the desert’s ancient seabeds to oceans.
My process in Navigation charts a course between control and abandon, cognition and intuition. I deliberately select materials that resist control. Using dance-like whole-body movements, I accept and utilize the fluidity of the wax and pigment. I let go, while remaining mindful. Layers and fluctuations map the flow of conscious and unconscious thought. Intuitive action and reaction bypass preconceived ideas of order and lead to new discoveries. Surprising forms, relationships and patterns emerge. Unplanned, yet not accidental, they reveal my deepest concerns: the poetry of science and spirit, the echo of the microcosm and the macrocosm.
