Artist Statement:
The niche is the spot in nature that a living thing calls home; in my art, my hope is to stimulate in the beholder the same feelings I have when I regard the world of my niche or home place. I am also fascinated with how places themselves generate spiritual personas, and the bonds that emerge between inhabitants and their homes, the flow and connection between alive things and non-living things. Akin to concepts in many other systems of understanding, ‘awen’ is the Welsh term for the life force possessed by all things; I understand the world around me as being full of awen and having great generative potential. I am a scientist as much as an artist and explored niches extensively with the medium of numbers and mathematical models during graduate school. It was during these years of intensive learning and knowledge creation that I arrived at a point of genuine appreciation for how consciousness (or spirit) is an emergent property of the universe, but that death or transience is essential to this creation.
Outdoor places are very important to me and I could say that my own niche includes the awen generated and present in the landscapes and nature of southeastern Ontario and western Quebec, where I have always called home. In my paintings, I look to communicate the presence of this life energy that I see around me to the viewer. Mainly I paint landscapes in watercolor, although sometimes I create works purely from the imagination to convey more symbolic meanings. Watercolor is a medium I came back to last year and I suspect it will stay central to my future creative projects. The clear hues and semi-transparent nature of the medium draw me into hypnotic states of happily spaced-out contemplation.
Frieda’s Work:
