June 2007: Sara Swink & Marcia Hindman

Sara Swink’s ceramic sculptures show a world that expresses a kind of subterranean existence. For Sara, the art and dream worlds are very inter-connected. She uses clay as a personal narrative of her life, often a reflection of inner experience, colored with a shade of humor. Swink’s figurative works include a series of swimmers contemplating their fates in the symbolic seas of the unconscious. Themes of a mysterious, watery underworld run through this current body of work, suggesting the artist’s desire for symbolic understanding and regeneration. Swimmers with truncated limbs mimic fish and fantasize about the life of the mermaid. She explains that swimmers are a way of expressing a longing for understanding of the spiritual journey and the implications of the unlimited potential represented by the water. With her piece, “Swimmer with Mermaid Dream”, fantasy is a great motivator. This swimmer envisions herself as a mermaid and it keeps her swimming---it keeps her engaged in life.

Marcia Hindman creates paintings that are colorful and vibrant. Her surfaces are lush with texture and depth. Each painting has at least 5 paintings underneath, keeping some areas and exposing some of the hidden under-painting. As a result of the many layers of paint that have been scraped away, drawn into, layered again with paint, the canvas offers up surprises and magical areas. All the paintings are oil and oil stick on canvas. The paintings in this series are a combination of planes of color and shapes that she continues to work with and add to each year. Hindman uses the repetition of shapes to explore new colors and combinations of colors to create movement, rhythm, range, tension, and balance. Her process of abstraction involves erasing lines, adding lines, covering up part of the shapes, and interlocking the shapes and lines. The result is an interesting composition with depth and uncovered surprises. As she explains, “I like to think of these images as my own alphabet telling a story in each painting that may remain a mystery even to me.”