Letha Colleen Myers

As an adult making art, I am doing what many of us strive to do — capture the essence of childhood memory and experiences so that I can look at it in comparison to where I am at in the current timeline of my life. Much of my work draws directly from experiences had with the surrounding landscapes of my childhood in the Pacific Northwest and my adventures in my small, sea side town. Which all got mixed up and tied into my musings on what I was learning and seeing at the time as a quiet, introspective child. This is primarily what you’ll see in my art work: landscapes slightly fractured and segmented by personal mental pathways and their corresponding struggles and/or epiphanies. The interplay of precision and flow is fascinating. In my own life --- particularly when I am making art --- there are often several different conflicting influences at work. My educational background is in architecture and design; I’m drawn to precision and have an innate, obsessive eye for the details that make or break how well objects inhabit three dimensional spaces. But I’m also a grown up child of nature who spent hours at a time up in a tree daydreaming with the breeze or down on the beach turning over stones to watch the little crabs frantically crawl away in search of new shelter. I know that so many living things balance on the edge of chaos and order. The act of creating a piece of art, for me, is a process that is the very definition of arriving at a conclusion through insight. Insight may seem like a random light bulb moment but most often arriving at that moment of insight is, in fact, a gestalt process of having seen things out of the corner of your eye, or many times without really seeing it until a pattern of recognition dawns on you all at once and a new solution is been born and lives. I am a collector of paper, metal and found objects. When I make art I am sitting at a very large table surrounded by elements that have been with me for years. I dabble and play with bits and pieces of papers and objects that I have rifled through many times until suddenly all the elements flow together and begin to form a new piece. Working with paper and found objects in a collage medium allows me the ability to break apart existing things and reassemble them into something new. And once again, in the construction process of my work, I experience the interplay of duality. Hand cutting paper (with an X-Acto blade and an ancient pair of orange Frisker scissors that belonged to my mother) is an act of deliberation, as is the final construction of the piece when tight technique and craftsmanship is critical to a cohesive piece. But the space in-between when I am composing? That’s an experience of giving in to flow, a space in which to follow internal landscapes to that moment of insightful conclusion the fixes a new piece in place giving it external life as a new entity.