HELLO AND WELCOME TO MY EXPLORATIONS
ARTIST STATEMENT:
My practice explores how emotion is shaped, stored, and communicated through visual systems. I work across drawing and sculpture, building forms that use color, pattern, and texture to create emotional and perceptual shifts. Repetition, rhythm, and transformation are central to how the work develops; structures evolve through accumulated units and internal logic, giving each piece its own emotional temperature.
Many of my forms begin with familiar structures—pinecones, ropes, sticks, tornadoes—and move toward objects that hold charge, memory, or mood. These forms often act like signals or characters, carrying tension, humor, or vulnerability. I’m interested in how emotion can be embedded in structure rather than depicted, and how objects can communicate without narrative.
My drawings operate as parallel investigations. They are dense, rhythmic fields of pattern and invented anatomy, where color and line behave like emotional systems. The drawings inform the sculptures, and the sculptures loop back into the drawings; the two practices are in constant dialogue.
Across mediums, I explore how patterns become language, how structures become symbols, and how visual logic can hold emotional resonance. My work builds worlds that are precise and open, rigorous and intuitive — spaces where viewers can sense, feel, and imagine through form.
BIO:
Raised in the great Midwest, I spent my childhood surrounded by prairie and open sky. After graduating from Rhode Island School of Design, I moved my studio to Brooklyn, NY, where I developed my practice for a decade before relocating to the Rocky Mountains. I hold an MFA from Columbia University’s School of the Arts.
“Pattie Lee Becker is, in my experience, a dream collaborator. She embodies that perfect tension between imaginative possibility and practical limitation that ensure projects explore and push the edges of expectation. At the same time, Pattie Lee is responsive and adaptable. My favorite moments in our series of collaborations have been when she’s taken an idea of mine and then devised a hybrid solution that, ultimately, incorporates and forwards the larger thematic idea of our collective work. Pattie Lee is adept at composing voices and ideas into digestible units of imaginative fodder, her creative energy is formidable, and I can imagine no better person with whom to engage on a project.”
- Brad O’Sullivan, Designer, Printer & Proprietor of Smokeproof Press”
“Pattie Lee Becker’s artistic process is a vigorous craft that involves assembling a variety of constituent elements into forms that can be read superficially, enjoyed as abstract compositions, or mined for deeper associations. In 2013, I had the pleasure of inviting Pattie Lee to participate in Design After Dark, an annual fundraiser benefiting the Department of Architecture, Design & Graphics at the Denver Art Museum. Undertaken with the same attention to craft and curiosity as other examples of her drawings and sculptures, Pattie Lee thoughtfully interpreted the theme of “cast” in a series of over-sized fishing lures. The five brightly patterned soft sculptures titled “Lures” combined elements of her previous works with randomly collected ones in imaginative ways. The results sparked curiosity and delight in the minds of both our guests and her fellow participants.”
- Darrin Alfred, Associate Curator of Architecture Design and Graphics, Denver Art Museum”