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 moment or concept.
I find myself emerging as an artist during a perfect storm of global instability, accelerating climate catastrophes, rising authoritarianism, eroding embodied connection, and so on. Not surprisingly, I often feel a pull to make art that sheds light on these social and environmental maladies, especially in the face of a general sense that I think so many of us feel, that there is little I can actually do to change anything about the current state of our society. Indeed I have tried to make this kind of art, and have failed and succeeded, as we all do with whatever endeavors we take on. And I imagine that I will, at some point, try again. However, the deeper I go into my art and artistic process, the more I find a (fortunately) preserved sense of joy at my core that aches to be let out. A quotidian joy, perhaps, as it is beckoned by the beautiful simplicity of the everyday - birds, trees, bright color, soft breezes, good food, the laugh of my spouse, and the silliness of my dog - but joy nonetheless.
So, all this is to say, that at its most basic level my art is about freeing and releasing that joy into the world (which I contend can be a useful antidote to the conditions we currently face). Sometimes that joy is apparent in the work itself, often it is simply part of the (my) process.
Broadly, my “subject matter” is about how we make meaning from our existence. More specifically, I'm interested in 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 unity of self, developed by cobbling together life experiences. I'm also interested in how that visual syntax, once on the substrate, can offer a bouyancy or levity to the way we see the world.
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.