Audrey Tulimiero Welch’s abstract, layered paintings reflect the personal impact—the grief and transformation—of the invisible forces of migration and ancestry. Drawing upon her Sicilian heritage and years spent living abroad, she uses mapping to explore interconnection, transformation, and the layers we carry.  Her exhibition, Poetic Cartography, at CA State Stanislaus University Art Gallery features over twenty large, layered paintings that span a ten-year period.  As an abstract painter, Welch maps the emotional weather of inner and outer worlds. Inspired by the artistic concept of poetic cartographies, she creates intuitive maps that chart consciousness and connection, reflecting the rhythms of poetry. Mapping is the artist’s language to locate herself in relation to time, place, and people, addressing our need to belong. Her abstract paintings respond to both the visible world and the internal realms of spirit and memory. Using physical maps, acrylic, plaster, photographic fragments, and masking fluid, her process embraces improvisation, chance, and risk-taking, building and excavating layers of color and line until turbulence meets stillness.

Gallery Director, Dean De Cocker comments that “Audrey Tulimiero Welch’s abstract …multi-layered, almost map-like work leaves the viewer looking for meanings. By constantly allowing the viewer to shift through ever interesting and dense layers, helps to create the interconnections to one’s own history. In her works, we also see and feel the years of the artist living abroad and the reflections of those distant lands in the creation of these poetic cartographies. We are very fortunate to have this exhibition in our gallery. “

From the exhibition catalog essay, art critic Richard Speer takes note of Welch’s “duets between straight lines and gestures, structure and fluidity, opacity and translucence; the interior psychic world and the exterior world of society…; and the tension between the planned and [in Welch’s words] ‘the improvisational, the unknown, chance, and the unexpected.’”