Andrea Donnelly

“My personal relationship with art is a private, internal one, so I am speaking from this perspective, from the experience of an individual. Even on this individual level, realignment of our humanity has an exponential impact.” –Andrea Donnelly

WHAT MOTIVATES YOU AS AN ARTIST?

Art is a very personal practice for me. Artmaking is a tool I use to filter, process, and understand the world that touches my senses, arouses my curiosity, inspires wonder, or provokes contemplation. The visual, tactile, and philosophical threads that I follow are a tangled, loopy web that drapes over my entire life, so the pleasure and necessity of thinking and making art is inseparable from anything else that I do…one thing fades into and influences the other as I move through my day and through the world.

ARE THERE DETAILS ABOUT IN THE WORK THAT YOU’D ESPECIALLY LIKE AUDIENCES TO PAY ATTENTION TO?

I would like them to notice that the direction of the dark marks on the threads is vertical in one panel and horizontal in the other: this indicates the original two halves of the cloth that were together and legible, now separated. I would also like them to notice how surface of the pieces change depending on where you look at them: they are very transparent when viewed head-on, but walking toward and around them, their colors shift and the perspective makes them opaque, so the markings stand out and the subtle color of the threads becomes concentrated. Also, the text at the top of the piece said, “A Labyrinth of Symbols,” and the page number at the bottom is an infinity sign, turned in the direction of an 8.

WHAT DOES THE WORD DECLARATION MEAN TO YOU?

I see my artmaking practice as one of creating questions from questions, deeper and deeper. It is open-ended, it is my deepest and most heartfelt communication from my internal world to the external world. I don’t declare, I am quiet. I inquire and send my thoughts and questions out into the world and hope that someone picks up the conversation on the other side. “Declaration”: this is what has been picked up on your end, and it is a beautiful and thrilling way to speak about the work. Questions and conversation: I think the idea of “Declaration” opens so many with my piece and I love to be taken on new journeys from different perspectives with the work as a starting point. Can a declaration be a whisper?

DO YOU BELIEVE ART HAS SOCIALLY TRANSFORMATIVE POWER?

Yes. Art works to keep us balanced (often by unbalancing us) in the midst of the world we humans have created for ourselves. The systems we have set up to direct the flow of our lives seem to take on a mind of their own, scaffolding built upon scaffolding, beyond the scale of the people who live within them. I believe artmaking, and participating in any kind of artistic experience, brings us back into our bodies, into our relationship with the present moment and the world and people around us.