Art Statement:
I make abstract paintings and collages by cutting and assembling fragments of my work. Disparate parts relate in transitory harmony, and tension grapples with wholeness and alignment. These constructed compositions are influenced by my practice of year round swimming in the SF Bay, and contain loose expressive lines, asemic writing, repeated shapes of arches and loops, and references to water and rocks.
My work often includes found paper from accounting ledgers, antique encyclopedias, and index cards. These pages have a patriarchal resonance of presumed certainty and rigid categorization. By painting or obscuring their surfaces, I subvert and shift them into a realm of ambiguity and multiplicity—pulling them into an ecosystem of constant flux, where being present in a physical experience offers instead an embodied knowledge and a somatic vulnerability.
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 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 Gallery. 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 six time Grammy winning husband.