Barbara Kendrick

I am a visual scavenger, always on the lookout for the thing that looks like another thing . The patterns in woodgrain look like eyes, mouths, hair, water. The reflection in a teacup looks like a map, a map looks like an anatomical drawing and the anatomical drawing of a spine reminds me of a fern. I collect the images from books, catalogs, internet searches, museum websites and from photos I take on my daily walks.

 

These bits and pieces form my collages. As I make the collages, I look for a collision of ideas, an uneasy relationship that provokes my imagination. I lose the image to abstraction and wrestle it back to representation. I craft these unlikely connections into fictions, exploring themes of bodily transformation.

 

Artist Bio   

Barbara F. Kendrick, Professor Emerita, School of Art and Design, University of Illinois, received her B.F.A. at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and her M.F.A. from The Ohio State University. She has exhibited her work in France, England and Greece as well as throughout the United States. She has received fellowships from the Millay Colony, the MacDowell Colony, the Henry Luce Foundation and the Virginia Center for Creative Arts. Other residencies include Yaddo, Jentel, Ragdale, Bemis, the Ecole des Beaux Arts, Cergy-Pontoise, France, Fundacio Artigas, Gallifa, Spain and the Burren College of Art in Ballyvaughan, Ireland. She has received grants from the Illinois Arts Council, Shirley Holden Helberg, the Mid-America Arts Alliance and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation