contemporary mixed media artist
About the Artist
Trish Boyles is an emerging mixed media artist in Charlotte, NC. Her work is about how we solidify the collection of salient moments in our lives into constructs of identity, beliefs, and narratives about ourselves, others, and the world. Through the creation of her own visual syntax, she seeks to understand how experiences and memories get layered in to create a kind of gestalt sense of a particular time or concept.
I started my art career in the late 80s when I entered college with an art major already declared. After three semesters of critiques I didn't understand, and a growing feeling of imposter syndrome, I dropped the major, believing I had no artistic ability. Or more accurately, believing I was not an "artist" - whatever that meant. Throughout my adult life I dabbled in visual arts, music, and writing but never applied consistent effort, my internal self-critic ever present just beneath the conscious surface, always pushing me into what others expected of me.
Then, in my early 50s, I was presented with a rare opportunity to step back from my life as a CFO and business owner and invest a few years in something I really wanted. That something was art and I have been dedicated to it since 2020. While I went into this time with a strong desire and focus to "be an artist" and "make great art," through the process I have learned that making art is so much more for me. The work has become a kind of therapeutic identity development and deep dive into self-understanding.
As I continue to unpack my self through art, I have begun to realize that at its most basic level my art is about freeing and releasing into the world, a long buried but fortunately preserved sense of joy inside me. Sometimes that joy is apparent in the work itself, often it is simply part of the (my) process. Making art embodies me and allows me to be embodied - something that I believe unlocks elements of our core identity that we may have forgotten or never known.
From a slighly more cerebral perspective, and broadly speaking, my “subject matter” is about how we come to develop and understand our place in the world by stringing together, layering, or stacking up the salient moments of our lives. In many ways, I am attempting to create a sort of visual syntax suggesting a complex and disorganized unity of self that still holds together as a sort of gestalt in any one moment, developed by cobbling together life experiences.
In the studio I work quickly and somewhat instinctually. In other arenas of my life I am measured, rational, and detailed, but my art requires a freedom of body and feeling that I seldom deploy elsewhere. I relish and welcome what “comes out of me” and revisit and refine iteratively until I'm satisfied a piece is complete.