Greenwich, CT

Phoebe Adams

https://www.phoebeadams.com/

My work is full of messages with sideways humor about psychological states. A realism gleaned not from symbolic logic or diaristic narrative but rather from close observation of nature’s peculiarities and human dilemmas. Physical stand-ins for states of mind that exhibit flux: transformations of one thing to another: a merging of messy, inarticulate states. Brancusi meets sci-fi. Metaphors about scale gotten from a lifetime of devoted amateur wanderings in the natural sciences. I have invented forms; manifested in bronze, carved wood, hair, encaustic, fiber, rubber glass that have been formed with the pleasure of my hand.

These pieces approach elegance, which is then subverted. Subverted by their placement, shifting scale or combinations of material coupled with the associations of the imagery itself. Resolutely unheroic, insistently non-polemical. Not resolving, but yoking together supposed binary conflicting dualities such as motion/rest, order/chaos, male/female, attraction/repulsion, nature/man-made.

Recently I have focused primarily on works on paper. The peculiarities of “place” are important. Landscape in motion from weather to the time of day. And it’s light. The nearly muted history of people standing at the same site is part of place. My internal state is the ramekin that holds these perceived elements for the shape that evolves layer by layer. Mixed into these layerings are images of plaid, a human construct from warp and weft. A sense of rapture at the density of natural phenomenon is combined with a darker view of changes and looming danger from our human interventions.