Art Statement:
Submerging into physical, embodied acts of mark making – painting, scraping, scratching, drawing – I create artifacts of inner awareness. Harvesting the most vital elements/gestures I choreograph compositions that struggle and settle, connect and collide. I search for moments of presence and alignment.
The work speaks in circles and arches, loops and lines. This symbolic vernacular reflects my concerns about wholeness, belonging, connection, listening, and a vulnerable somatic understanding.
Found paper from accounting ledgers, antique encyclopedias, and index cards attract me. I subvert these relics of authority, categorization and certainty, pulling them into a realm of ambiguity and multiplicity. Textblocks and letterforms dissolve into pure shape or symbol, like half-heard phrases hovering below complete comprehension. Asemic writing of gestural loops likewise offers no clarity, existing only as a reference to language or a cyclical pattern of breath.
Bio:
Emily Shepard was born in Boston, Massachusetts and attended Middlebury College in Vermont, where she majored in history, and began her fine art studies. She pursued further work in printmaking at Boston’s School of the Museum of Fine Arts and Massachusetts College of Art, and after moving to Colorado, studied drawing at CU Boulder and book arts at Naropa University. Later, she relocated to the San Francisco Bay Area to attend the California College of the Arts, where she received an MFA with Distinction in work that integrated printmaking, book arts and sculpture. Shepard was honored with the Barclay Simpson Award, and has shown her work locally and nationally in juried exhibitions, including the Crocker-Kingsley exhibition in Sacramento and on Artsy with Jen Tough and the Artist Alliance. She is a member of the artist-run gallery, Mercury20 in Oakland, CA. Her work is included in private and corporate collections.
Shepard swims year round in the San Francisco Bay without a wetsuit, which focuses her senses, challenges her will and informs her art. She shares her artistic space with her five time Grammy winning husband.