HELLO AND WELCOME TO MY EXPLORATIONS
ARTIST STATEMENT:
My work begins with awe at the things I encounter: the patterns and textures of the natural world, the mystery of the cosmos, objects bound to memory and experience, the interior psychological spaces of other people.
I work with my hands because making is how I think. Ideas arrive through material play, through free drawing, through the act of exploration itself in both two and three dimensions. The work often knows before I do. A form investigated through repetition reveals its meaning slowly. Sometimes years pass before I understand what I have been making and why.
The work holds two things simultaneously: rigorous formal investigation and genuine strangeness, meticulous craft and absurdist humor, high design sensibility and folk surrealism.
Since 2001, a private vocabulary of forms has accumulated and migrated across every medium: crystals, ropes, eyes, pinecones, cells, sticks, houses, dice, fruit, gifts. These are not symbols with fixed meanings. They are characters, recognizable and recurring, capable of new relationships in each new context. Pattern is the primary carrier of meaning throughout, never decorative, always content.
The subject has remained constant: awe at being alive, curiosity about other people's inner worlds, and the belief that making something by hand is how you come to understand both.
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”