Anna is an artist and educator passionate about continuously exploring transformative approaches to art making, community practice, and connection to land in light of destabilized socio-ecological contexts.
She operates as an independent artist, a community arts facilitator, and an art educator. These three modalities directly relate to each other, yielding a sustainable and holistic approach that allows me to flow between intuitive expression, social/environmental connection, and creative guidance.
Anna received a BFA in Painting from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2012, a Masters of Arts in Art Education from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2022, and is currently pursuing a Masters of Fine Arts at UMass Amherst. Anna currently teaches through the Center for Art Education and Sustainability, the Continuing Education department of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and in the Undergraduate Art department at Umass Amherst.
You can learn more about her teaching practice here: annachapmaneducation.com
Artist Statement
My art is a quest for healing and interconnectivity in a time of socio-ecological destabilization. Amidst my work is an undercurrent of influence stemming from the social sciences, the humanities, ecology, and the healing arts. These disciplines shape the way in which socio-ecological and individual emotional questions intersect. Like multi-species feminist theorist Donna Haraway (2016), I find that “staying with the trouble of complex worlding is the name of the game of living and dying together well” (pp. 29) on a damaged earth. I believe that “staying with the trouble” is necessary groundwork to render a person capable of mobilizing toward learned, livable futures that are rooted in reciprocal ecologies.
I use both representation and abstraction to create an aesthetics of entanglement. In doing so, I engage a wide range of mediums and substrates, including wild-crafted paints to reflect the natural landscape and recycled newspapers to archive human affairs. On a technical level, I am formally trained through the Rhode Island School of Design and 10 years of subsequent independent study. If possible, I work as large as on a one-to-one scale with my subject matter to create an immersive, relational field between the viewer and the artwork.
In an era of mass extinction and global warming, I’m compelled to imagine multi-species entanglement on local and planetary scales. Many of my abstract works are speculative maps, drawn from intuition, trying to grasp the complexity of Earth system processes. I’m interested in how the layering of text, pattern, and texture can begin to communicate a nuanced, pluriversal and non-linear complex real, as in my piece Mapping Hyperobjects. I use mark-making and print-making to create surfaces that feel active and challenge notions of inanimacy. These patterns appear reminiscent of swarm behavior, mycelial networks, or wind and tidal patterns.
In my representational work I use the body as a reference point to investigate entanglement, collapsing the boundaries between self and other, self and environment, self and the dead or unborn. Bones, roots, medicinal plants, and architectural relics from the industrial revolution accompany the figures in my work to signify sites of historical interconnectivity and future potential. While I embrace traditional approaches to representation, the concepts that drive my work fundamentally question anthropocentric mythos of individualism and objectification, much of which the Western canon of Art History is predicated upon.
The beginning stages of my process often take place outside, where I create life-size observational drawings in urban or natural environments that are brought back into the studio to be edited, taped, cut out, and arranged (see Limits & Sanctuary, I). During this stage, I embrace process to dampen fear of failure and encourage risk taking. This is often my favorite stage of the overall process because of the aesthetics of repair that emerges. Piecing together individual fragments to create a larger whole helps me realize the interconnectivity of a seemingly fragmented world. From this arrangement comes a master composition that informs a larger painting or a series. Recycling and editing imagery in this way reflects the constant state of change behind all beings, regardless of how fixed or permanent something might feel.
