Candacee White (b. 1984) is a multidisciplinary artist based in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Her work centers on themes of nature, displacement, exploration and identity. Her printmaking and collage work reflect a sustained fascination with cultural exchange and the natural world. Her woodcuts combine traditional craft with a modern take on traditional religious imagery. Through collage and paint, she explores themes of space, place and identity.
In her first career as an educator, she explored over 85 countries during 15 years of living overseas. Her experiences abroad have greatly informed her current interests and art practice. Her work has been featured in solo exhibits in Tulsa and Yangon, Myanmar, and various exhibits across the U.S. and beyond.
Statement
My work is about proximity — how close or far we are from each other, from home, from meaning, from the sacred. I explore this through collage, painting, and printmaking, each medium offering a different way to think about connection and distance.
Years of living abroad have shaped my practice. I lived in five countries over fifteen years, working as a teacher, and that experience made me attentive to how people locate meaning across cultures — how we navigate place and identity, form beliefs, and make sense of the world, particularly as we relocate, migrate, or change over time. My work reflects a sustained curiosity about displacement and belonging, the pursuit of mystery, and the unseen forces that shape human experience.
In collage, I use scraps of paper and fabric collected during my travels, arranging them into compositions that resemble maps, landscapes, or neither. These fragments serve as material memory — traces of place brought together in new configurations. The work reflects both wonder at the variety and complexity of the world, and a sense of distance from it.
In painting, I work abstractly with biomorphic shapes in deliberate spatial relationship to one another. I pay close attention to the spacing between forms as a way to explore interpersonal connection — everyone's sense of "close" is different, and the compositions I build reflect that unique variety. Abstract work has the power to express nuance and sensation in ways that remain open to each viewer's interpretation.
Through printmaking, particularly relief, I offer a contemporary take on religious imagery. My Christian upbringing made me curious about faith traditions in other parts of the world. By combining disparate religious symbols, deities, and animals, I share a pluralist, open-minded perspective on the shared human pursuit of mystery across time and culture. This pursuit, I believe, is what makes us most human.
I work intuitively, following compositional instinct and visual interest. The themes that recur — proximity, displacement, mystery, connection — emerge through the process of making rather than being predetermined. I trust that the work reveals what I'm thinking about before I can articulate it in words.