Laine Justice

ARTIST STATEMENT

I am an intuitive maker with an interdisciplinary practice, working in painting, textiles, bookmaking, and more.

I explore feelings of place, autonomy, identity, and play. Using layered markmaking, I weave together hybrid creatures in states of shifting identity and form, into sculpted and emotive, abstracted landscapes.

Working with materials of contrasting sheen and texture creates image within image along with conflicting visual planes that bounce animals back and forth between figuration, landscape, or abstraction. I am in love with painting materials, making use of almost everything. Handmade paint with speciality pigments, tube paint impasto, drawing, and spectral materials like mini glass mosaic or interference pigments that shift colors with light, thread through all my work.

Giant puzzles, these places are spaces I have been, or want to stand before to play while continually finding something new. Pareidolia is the concept we are all so familiar with: staring up at the sky, searching, and finding a familiar shape or two in the clouds. Even though it’s autonomous we often ask someone, do you see that too? There is something magical about imagining spaces that are only for you, escaping the something real right before you, the freedom to change your mind at any time, or to share your world with others, knowing we just may or may not ever see the same thing.

My work explores these these imaginative, elusive spaces and their intersection with our sense of place and self. The spirit of the wild, natural world that envelops us, with our more human, emotional worlds, and the internal places this meeting creates within each of us. These spaces began for me as a refuge from childhood trauma and disability when I was young, and continue to describe the world I experience now and times I have been that have no words.

Curiosity and play provide endless possibilities as we relate to ourselves and each other. My favorite question is “what do you see?”