Lesley Patterson-Marx, Visual Artist

Through the process of making prints, drawings, artist’s books and mixed-media work, I express wonder at the connections between human life and the natural world, order within chaos, and the sublime mysteries that lie within the mundane. The subject matter in my work arrives from the process of collecting. In poring over old magazines, sifting through jars of buttons, arranging stacks of sepia and black-and-white photographs, and collecting bug-eaten leaves, four-leaf clovers and cicada wings that I find on daily walks, I arrive at the images and textures that move me to make something more of them than they could be on their own. Arranging them within my work reminds me that I am a part of something familiar and cyclical that would otherwise seem vast and unknowable.