Statement

I visualize the places where multiple spaces meet, using detailed images of nature and intuited curves, for people who wonder how the imaginary and physical spaces they occupy affect their ability to feel fully alive and connected to the world around them.

In my art, I grasp at occasions when I feel the world open. Day to day, my mind encloses and flattens the space around me. The images I create strengthen my belief in the reality of openness and possibility.

The depth around me often doesn’t seem real, as though a screen separates me from the world. Believing in depth involves breaking this screen to forge a connection between myself and the other. I create landscapes in which self and the other are opposite sides of one fabric. By visualizing two-sided folds, my art identifies a closeness that has been lost. I also visualize double surroundings. My body surrounds everything I see, my vision creating the world’s boundaries. Images are stored and remixed inside me. My art shows bodies encircling outside spaces. But the world also surrounds me with its mix of space and more solid matter. I know that my body is small.

May contemplating boundaries allow us to move more freely in our minds and through the physical spaces that surround us.

Biography

Ardea Thurston-Shaine makes oil paintings, sculptures, and fiber and glass art picturing the places where multiple spaces meet. To her early experiences with wilderness, Buddhist practice, and contemplating dream imagery, she added an undergraduate study of visual art at Oberlin College and an MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University, graduating in 2018.

Influences on Ardea’s work include Buddhist and Western philosophy, mental health work, and being alone in nature. She values the combination of realism and abstraction that draws viewers in while inviting them to myriad viewings and interpretations.

Ardea has participated in juried group shows across North America, including shows in Chicago, Boston, Seattle, Toronto, and New York City. In 2021, her work was included in the London Art Biennale. She has received a Canada Council for the Arts professional development grant, been solicited for public art by the Kitchener Waterloo Art Museum, and participated in multiple residencies, including at the Vermont Studio Center, in Johnson Vermont.

Ardea is currently working on a series of oil paintings of water surfaces as metaphors for the boundaries of our identity as individuals. She hopes to elucidate the ways that the spaces we inhabit affect our ability to be fully alive within the world.