Meg Boe Birns

About

Artist statement

Both my work are especially driven by a need for texture, and feature a level of impasto that indicates a sculptural value. I work with paint, canvas, papier mache, wood and other media to create pieces that do not subsume the materials within the content, but instead make the materials I am using part of the subject matter. Whether abstract or figurative, my work will often integrate tactility into a design or pattern, but it is not the product of a conscious or intellectual plan. No one said this better than the art critic Tony Cavanaugh, who wrote that I create "with an intuitive feeling, as though the imagery springs directly from the artist's unconscious in the manner of automatic writing." Another way of saying this is that my work comes from a part of my psyche that is hidden from me. Or more recently this is a side of myself I find when it is as if I have entered a magical forest, or a magical forest that is always waiting for me; a forest that as Baudelaire says, is filled with things that “look at me with familiar eyes.”