Artist Statement – Anne Kearney - 10 July 2026

My art practice thrives on tension and contradiction. On opposing truths. On ideas that don't easily resolve. Most recently, I have been thinking about how what seems fixed and solid is really just an improbability caught mid-motion — a shape that is somehow more than its parts, held still long enough to be seen before continuing on its way to becoming something else.

A wave gliding toward shore is a predictable outcome of wind and friction. Yet this exact wave — this particular gathering of water — is wholly improbable. A person is the same kind of emergence — an improbable being made of elements that have lived in many shapes before and will live in many shapes to come.

Figuring out how to express these tensions in my figurative work is both a struggle and a joy. Figures, patterns, boundaries, forms — the intention is to give a sense of assembly and reassembly, of a fleeting singular moment within a sea of change. Follow the line of a cheek, a flower, a fold of fabric, and it carries you somewhere else entirely before resolving, again, into something recognizable.

I work back and forth between water-bath marbling, collage, and direct painting — a process that enacts the very tension I am drawn to. Marbling predictably produces a pattern, yet each particular pattern is its own kind of whole shaped by the unpredictable interactions of paint and environment. The same play between predictability and surprise continues as I layer paint and collage – I bring my own intentions, yet the materials interact with one another and insist on becoming a whole I didn't quite plan.

I cannot know what a viewer will discover through their own back and forth between intentional looking and a painting's demands. But for me, each painting is a chance to sit in the tension between the fixed and the improbable – and to appreciate how precious a singular, fleeting moment can be.