Artist's Statement
There is a sweetness between sleep and dreams - a loveliness as we transition from our waking reality to our inner world. As someone who has always had a vibrant dream life I have often found many of my dreams carry with me into consciousness, leaving me with images I’m not sure were real or imagined. My work seeks to evoke this feeling through the exploration of space: the physical, the temporal, the conceptual and the liminal. Using encaustic, wood, metal, paper, and natural materials I examine how objects, people, and ideas occupy the space they inhabit. Noticing the negative space between people and objects is often an indicator of a type of relationship: intimacy, frustration, tension all become apparent given the space or lack thereof between bodies. Similarly, speech patterns such as pauses, ideologies, and dreams all can weave a story. My work is my interpretation of these stories; a juxtaposition of my inner world onto the physical.
Biography
Ariel McGrath is a visual artist who has been specializing in encaustic for 6 years. She was previously a classically trained pianist for 15 years regularly competing around West Michigan. Ariel picked up collage as a way to express herself in college keeping junk journals as a visual diary of her dreams & daily life. She discovered encaustic paint in the summer of 2016 at a camp for adult artists ran by the art collective Lucky Shoe Arts. Encaustic allows her creations to come alive with texture and sculpture in a way that was not possible with paper alone. The medium allows the incorporation of other materials such as metal, clay, flora, and fauna for the full expression of her ideas. Ariel is a member of the Lucky Shoe Arts Collective out of West Michigan. She resides in Brooklyn, NY with her partner & two cats. In her free time she trains Muay Thai, Jiu Jitsu, and can be found somewhere with a good book.
