B.F.A. Student Spotlight: Joanna Pottle
School of Art Design and Art History
ENMESH
Joanna Pottle
joannapottle.com
BFA Capstone Exhibition
BFA Studio Art, Painting and Drawing, and Art Education with an Art History Minor
Exhibition Dates: March 24th-30th
Weekend Opening: Saturday, March 24th 11am-1pm
Weekday Opening; Monday, March 26th + Artist Talk 6-7:30pm
This exhibition discloses the evolution and accumulation of Joanna Pottle’s studio work, with selected pieces shown created at various points during her academic career at James Madison University. Primarily a painter, Pottle also experiments with drawing and screenprinting, recently utilizing various mixed media approaches incorporating different combinations of the previously mentioned elements and more. The selected works were carefully chosen to foreshadow components of her Honors College BFA Thesis Project, to be concluded December 2018, including methods of research, experimentation, medium, and content.
Pottle’s work investigates human dysfunctionality and how that manifests externally and internally on multiple levels, specifically in relation to substance use disorder and mental illness. How the ideas and terms such as brokenness and woundedness manifest in bodily form, many times affecting the brain neurologically and psychologically and exploring how self reflection, vulnerability, and accountability can aid in combating these adversities. Joanna depicts these ideas through representations of the human form and related organic imagery, with varying degrees of realism and abstraction and vivid use of color.
The term Enmesh embodies all of these ideas, in both medium and content. Enmesh is the cause to become entangled in something; intertwined, embedded, and ensnared. It also translates as involving (someone) in a difficult situation from which it is hard to escape.
Enmeshment specifically is also more generally designated as submerging and overwhelming codependent relationships where an unhealthy symbiosis is in existence.
Symbiosis is the interaction between two different organisms living in close physical association, typically to the advantage of both.
The parallel of the scientific connections to relational, behavioral habits, and universal human adversities is an overarching theme in Joanna’s work.
- Secrecy vs. truth | oil on canvas | 2016
- Vulnerability |oil on canvas | 2016
- Shattered Bloom | oil on canvas | 2016
- Collision | oil on canvas | 2017
- Rose Colored Glasses | 2017
- Submerged | oil on canvas
- Hayley Michelle | screenprint | 2017
- Roam | screenprint | 2017
- Embrace(d) | screenprint | 2017
- Broken Together | oil on canvas | 2017
- Raw | oil, screenprinting, + fibers | 2017
_________________________________________________________________________________
Artist Statement
The connection and friction between the human soul with its intrinsic joys and turmoil’s and its enmeshment with the physical internal and external bodily form has always fascinated me; the quirks, insecurities, shame, delights, woundedness, and dysfunction. I am especially interested in how this relationship manifests into tangible forms of substance use disorder and various veins of mental illness;
investigating human fragility in all its marvelous messiness.
I embody these thoughts through a purposeful layering, constructing and demolishing approach of painting with mixed media approaches such as screenprinting. The multifaceted complexities of such content demand equal amounts of intensity in medium and process in order to communicate effectively. The research, stories, and context inform the eventual outcome of the work and in turn, manipulating while simultaneously allowing the material to bring about its own existence;
depicting moments of climax and tension in which the viewer is required to complete the piece with their conclusion of that particular moment in time—whether this is a conscious decision or not;
is it all falling apart
or is it coming back together?
