Interview with David Limrite of The Create Anyway Collective.
Artist Statement
It is the memory of divine awe and connection in the landscape that becomes the departure point for my work. It starts with spontaneous mark making and moves towards a quieter practice. With painting, as on any adventure, there are questions along the way, times to act quickly or to sit still and ponder. Visual references to tangles or roots, and colors that may recall fire and fog are metaphors for the struggles along the mystic journey for direct experience of the transcendent. The bright pops of color are reminders to hold on to hope and the promise of enlightenment even amidst the darkness. I use layers as a ritual for discovery. I’m searching for the mysteries of balancing the joy and grief of living on a planet in crisis. In this contemplative practice it is the act of listening that propels and informs the work.
Ralph Waldo Emerson writes about the sublime experience in nature, “Standing on bare ground, - my head bathed in blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, - all … egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me …”
Artist Biography
Anna Hamer (b. 1958, San Bernardino, CA, USA) is a mixed-media painter whose abstract work is inspired by our hidden connections to the natural world. She uses layers in her paintings as metaphor for how our personal filters of experience influence and color our views of our environs. In her formative years she was encouraged by winning a state-wide art contest (Keep SC Clean & Green) during the birth of the environmental movement and the first Earth Day in 1970 and has since been delving further into the eco-grieving framework. Hamer earned her BFA from Ringling College of Art, Sarasota, FL with post graduate work from the College of Charleston, SC. She has participated in exhibitions at Artfields in Lake City, SC; Marcia Wood Gallery, Swan Coach House Gallery, several Great Mattress Factory Shows as well as others including a solo show at Callanwolde Arts Center in Atlanta, GA. Hamer has been the recipient of art residencies at the Caversham Centre in Balgowan, South Africa, North Adams Art Center near MOCA Massachusetts and is a Hambidge Center Fellow. She has been an art instructor at Acoma Pueblo in New Mexico and inner-city Atlanta, GA. Hamer is also first soprano with the all women, femme and non-binary activist group the Atlanta Resistance Revival Chorus that was featured in the documentary RESIST. She currently resides and works in Atlanta, GA.