• Resume •
		Anne G. Greenwood - Artist's Statement 2010 I am a mixed media artist living in Portland, Oregon. I have worked with photography, printmaking, textiles, and book arts. My creative practice over the last twenty years has consisted primarily of visual art, history, and working with plants. My work in horticulture and history have influenced my art through the exploration of past ideas and ways of making things as well as inspiring an ephemeral energy, a connection to living things and etherial relationships. As such, the visual work I have made has been done to create a physical linkage or record in connecting my worlds of ideas to ways of life and human experience. My artistic process is influenced by collaboration, community-based projects and a concept written about in David Pye's book The Nature and Art of Workmanship. The term “workmanship of certainty” refers to an artist or craftsperson working with tools and equipment that allow for precision, repetition and consistent reproduction, as can be found with the use of a printing press or machine-stitching for example. “Freeworkmanship” is working artistically without this element of certainty, as in embroidery or free drawing. The result is not known with certainty. The domestic and folk arts have a long tradition of gaining inspiration through daily life and using freeworkmanship in artistic expression. I explore these methods of workmanship through my use of materials, by scanning embroidery or fabric pattern and translating them into printed form to make prints, books or other visual messages. Presently, my artwork examines pattern. The memories or associations surrounding textile patterns: quilts, blankets, clothes, and linens, evoke qualities similar to folk songs or ballads. Both originate among people in a specific country or area, and are passed down by oral tradition from one generation to the next, often several versions of a story or song exist. Beginning as anecdotes, reports, accounts, histories, legends, fables, or myth, they are communicated over time by many people. The stories or songs often have patterns representing family tradition or messages of personal history and these are woven into the textiles or rhythms themselves. I am working on large scale fabric collages and a series of one-of-a-kind, small fabric books combining screen printing, natural dying, and hand-stitching exploring patterns based on my relationship to the natural world. In the summer of 2010, I began the project Finding People, Pattern, and Place. In this community-based art project, I am collaborating with many artists and communities to research an idea and create exhibitions. In this on-going project, community members are asked to participate in an introspective exercise identifying their connection to a textile pattern and create an image about that connection.