Barbara Page
Trumansburg, New York
Trumansburg, New York
Bio: Learning to fly was the catalyst for Barbara Page’s career as an artist. After earning her pilot’s license, she took up painting and received her MFA from Cornell University. Her projects that deal with the passage of time include Rock of Ages, Sands of Time, a series of 544 bas-relief paintings depicting the evolution of life, permanently installed at the Museum of the Earth in Ithaca NY, and Book Marks, an expanding catalog of her reading history. She has enjoyed residencies at the Golden Foundation and Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and is a member of The Center for Book Arts in New York City.
Statement: Mapping space and time has absorbed me ever since I got my pilot’s license years ago. The resulting body of work ranges from museum installations to altered books. I am not tied to technique. As an artist I have no map to guide me, but I proceed with blind faith to unanticipated destinations, making my own charts as I go. My arrivals and departures have taken me around the world and into the realm of the imagination.
I have been keeping journals for about thirty-five years in an effort to capture what would otherwise be buried under present circumstances. What is the measure of the days of our lives? Canceled checks and faded photographs? In an accumulation of dates and discarded debris I look for telling evidence of what makes us who we are. One day I realized that my stack of journals was analogous to the stratified rock in the lofty cliffs near my home. The evidence of time’s passage is articulated in reams of paper in one case and layers of shale in the other. My journals measure time in weeks, while geologists divide time into epochs and eons. Contemplating our perception of time as both continuous and arbitrarily divisible resulted in the creation of Rock of Ages, Sands of Time, a series of 544 contiguous painted panels, each representing the passage of a million years and depicting fossil flora and fauna in chronological order. I converted time into space.
Statement: Mapping space and time has absorbed me ever since I got my pilot’s license years ago. The resulting body of work ranges from museum installations to altered books. I am not tied to technique. As an artist I have no map to guide me, but I proceed with blind faith to unanticipated destinations, making my own charts as I go. My arrivals and departures have taken me around the world and into the realm of the imagination.
I have been keeping journals for about thirty-five years in an effort to capture what would otherwise be buried under present circumstances. What is the measure of the days of our lives? Canceled checks and faded photographs? In an accumulation of dates and discarded debris I look for telling evidence of what makes us who we are. One day I realized that my stack of journals was analogous to the stratified rock in the lofty cliffs near my home. The evidence of time’s passage is articulated in reams of paper in one case and layers of shale in the other. My journals measure time in weeks, while geologists divide time into epochs and eons. Contemplating our perception of time as both continuous and arbitrarily divisible resulted in the creation of Rock of Ages, Sands of Time, a series of 544 contiguous painted panels, each representing the passage of a million years and depicting fossil flora and fauna in chronological order. I converted time into space.