Whether I call myself an artist, a maker or merely a human walking the earth for a finite number of days, I feel compelled to create objects and images. Perhaps it is the childlike delight of getting dirty in a garden, or the pleasure of someone looking at my work with admiration, awe and wonder, but in my recent series of plant portraits, I am encouraging others to observe. Not only is there discrete beauty, wisdom and a clever resourcefulness by design in every plant, but we owe each weed respect for making earth habitable.
What I am doing is not new, but there is a new urgency calling attention to fully consider the impact humans are making. We need art as a mechanism to engage with and recognize the critical health of our ecosystem. Every individual has a role to play to correct the imbalances of capitalism and even more so the increasing and unnatural speed technology is forcing us to live with. Making, painting forces us to slow down to a human speed, participating in that is a practice.
I will leave you here to explore my website and hope that it causes you to seek out my work in three dimensions, or to take a walk and see with fresh eyes. There is, after all, no substitute.
about j.e. paterak [she/her/hers]
An artist & studio jeweler has made Portland, Maine her home for over 30 years. Having studied painting and printmaking in college and metalsmithing in graduate school, she has for the most part toggled her work between the two focuses. Painting / drawing her first love, with later creating sculptural work, primarily limited edition studio jewelry in fine metals. In the mid 2000s she broke from all art to explore working in the architecture and green building industry. At that time she studied horticulture, botany and design while renovating a home, creating a semi-urban biodiverse yardscape, complete with fruit trees, shrubs chickens & a sizable vegetable garden.
Her work has been exhibited nationally and has been published in numerous books and publications [see CV]. She is co-owner and curator for the Portland gallery Zero Station.
In her ‘free’ time she can be found in her garden, walking with friends, foraging for fungi or furthering her knowledge on a botanical foray with the Josselyn Botanical Society or most recently learning how to become a backyard beekeeper for the bees that swarmed into the yard to call it home.
