Statement

Nan Curtis is an interdisciplinary artist working in various mixed media, sculpture, and installation. Her craft-based experience in metalworking, welding, and fabrication drives her practice. Materials and found objects combine in the work using mediums like kiln-formed glass, textiles, raw cotton, wood, construction flags, springs from an old mattress, photography, and video. Some are intensely personal possessions that Curtis culls from her studio’s material library - a handmade indigo-dyed and woven rug, diaries, childhood dolls, boxes of ashes from deceased pets, and the urn of her late father. Many of these items are things she has accumulated over the years; transported and cared for between homes, studios, and back again. Lately, they have coalesced, carefully and precariously, into sculptures that are arranged in piles and stacks – cairns. Cairns are a marker, a memorial, and a constructed object — a memory arranged for a space and viewer. The work addresses the enigmatic and visceral themes relating to the day-to-day; relationships, memory, motherhood and family. Her lighthearted approach to presenting profoundly personal and universal quips of the human experience is mischievousness, poignant and earnest. The work elevates and subverts the mundane.