Audrey Tulimiero Welch
Damascus: Mapping Place, Home, and Exile
October 7 - 30, 2021
Russo Lee Gallery
City Of Aleppo, Acrylic On Canvas, 2021
PRESS RELEASE
Russo Lee Gallery is also pleased to present Damascus: Mapping Place, Home, and Exile by Audrey Tulimiero Welch. This is the artist’s second exhibition with the gallery. She creates energetic paintings that reference mapping, current and historical events, borders, and human activity while remaining purely abstract. Welch is a world traveler and uses stories drawn from her experiences, as well as poetry and philosophy to inform her process and the paintings that result.
Audrey Tulimiero Welch is an internationally exhibited painter who grew up in Livingston, New Jersey, and currently resides in Tacoma, Washington. She earned her BFA in 1980 from the University of Delaware and her MFA (Scholarship Award) in 2010 from the Art Institute of Boston at Lesley University. For the past fifteen years, Welch has lived and work in Indonesia, Thailand, and Australia which led the artist to focus on the subjects of line, mapping, and place. Welch’s abstract acrylic paintings can be read as metamorphic ‘maps’ that contain in their vibrant layers embedded stories and the lived relationships of daily life.
“What is the role of suffering? I want to face their suffering (and probably my own) and then surround it with life, with the greening of Viriditas, and with hope.”
ARTIST STATEMENT
In the studio, I am developing new work for an upcoming solo exhibition opening October 7, 2021 at the Russo Lee Gallery in Portland. Themes driving this work include: the city of Damascus, Rumi’s poetry, and Viriditas.
The city of Damascus was selected because it has meaning for me personally due to my own nomadic experience. Also, I was moved by my own state of despair as I witnessed from afar the diaspora of the Syrian refugees. I felt compelled to look at maps that depicted the places they walked as they sought shelter in neighboring Jordan. Working with these maps triggered my own experience of being a foreigner, of being exiled.
Furthermore, I am incorporating these maps into my painting’s surface as an empathetic gesture of kinship. Through painting i was to feel their tragic story, to somehow create a space for their suffering and connect with empathy to their despair. I want to address, in a very insufficient way, the question: What is the role of suffering? I want to face their suffering (and probably my own) and then surround it with life, with the greening of Viriditas, and with hope. I am motivated to paint the healing, the potential for transformation.
Reading the poems of Rumi before I begin painting helps to create an atmosphere and tone of poetic mystery and a sense of the Divine, a mood that I am trying to capture in this series. In contrast to the despair of Damascus is the theme of hope that viriditas represents.
Although these worthy subjects drive the work, their remnants may not be visible to the viewer in the final abstract paintings. Damascus, maps, refugees, and viriditas are the ideas that propel me into making. Their function is more peripheral; they provide a way for me to start a painting but the real magic only happens when my body engages with my materials - pigments, plaster, brush, tape, and canvas - it’s that dance that opens the door to unknown possibilities.
-Audrey Tulimiero Welch September 2021