Winter Salon 2024

Statement
I first experienced an appreciation of the handmade from makers in my family, especially the women, who knitted, tatted, crocheted, embroidered, baked and cooked, taking their time to create fine handmade objects that all bore the print of the maker. Even the recipes, handed down to me, an avid baker who once worked as a pastry chef to support my painting, were handwritten with the fingerprints and notations of the pastry maker preserved as part of the inheritance. I grew up on stories of strong ancestors who survived hardship with imagination and persistence, tools that as an artist I count as my most essential.

As an interdisciplinary visual artist, published poet and author, my work is conceptually driven, using mediums that best serve the concept. A common theme in my work is interiors; physical interiors such as rooms, interior states of being communicated through figurative works, interiors like heartlands and depths. Painting methods that produce translucency interest me in particular since the materials themselves create a sense of interiority over time with transparent layers one atop another.

“Intimast,” is an invented title I embrace because it so beautifully captures my passion for the vast contained in the small moment. At the nexus of written and visual language, I create visual poetry in the form of individual artworks meant to be read like lines of a poem, often alongside the text of my poetry. What sets my work apart is that each piece is one of a kind, only sometimes repeating in style or scale. Unique and handmade, my artworks are in fact part of a series, the unifying thread being my hand, voice, and eye. In this way, I offer the viewer my own small moments — of life, art, and the pursuit of visual poetics.

Bio
Nan Ring is a visual artist, poet and the author of the critically acclaimed memoir, Walking On Walnuts, Bantam, 1996. In her artwork and poetry, she focuses on ideas of vastness within the intimate small moment. Recurring themes in her still life, figurative and abstract works are feminism, ephemerality, the domestic as a metaphor for home and country, and interiors both literal and psychological. She received the Vermont Studio Center Artist’s Fellowship Award, the Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation/NEA Fellowship Award, and a New York Foundation for the Arts Artists’ Fellowship Award. She has been awarded numerous artist-in-residencies, including Hambidge, I-Park, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Ucross Foundation, Djerrassi, and Millay Arts, among others. Her national art exhibitions include Riverview Gallery, VA, The Painting Center, NYC, Susan Eley Gallery, Hudson, NY, and 14C Art Fair, NJ among others. Her poetry has been published on Gray Sparrow Press and on About Place Journal. Ring earned her MFA from The University of the Arts, PA, and her BFA from Syracuse University School of Visual and Performing Arts.