Beatrice Modisett is the featured artist for the “On Collapse” Community Anthology. Below is their artist statement, which provides context for the artwork they submitted for the anthology, which you can find on the top of each published piece.
When I was twenty-five, after years of saving, I quit my full-time office job to travel across the country. My route was planned around my immense desire to ride the California Zephyr, a fifty-one hour train from Emeryville, CA to Chicago, IL that travels over the Rockies and the Sierras, into deserts and the Great Plains. I rented a car and spent five weeks meandering through the middle of the country to visit as many National Parks as I could on my way to Emeryville.
I was traveling alone, during the winter, so most of the campsites were either empty or had one or two tents up. I spent some really wild nights by myself in some very remote landscapes. The most pivotal part of the trip that spurred a lot of my current obsessions and research was the time I spent alone with Delicate Arch in Moab, Utah. Void of the usual tourist crowds, I sat and stared at this formation for hours, grappling with the fact that the forces that create it are also simultaneously destroying it. I was able to wrap my head around erosion as an inherently hopeful process, and ultimately this led to my understanding that landscape could serve as a metaphor for an interior self.
I am interested in the space between creation and destruction, convergence and collapse. I consider this to be a hopeful space and look for instances of it in my individual internal landscape, the social-political landscape, and the broader non-human landscape. It is memories and visual speculations of the latter that inform the imagery of these drawings. This interest in collapse and regrowth is further embraced through process and material. The drawings go through multiple iterations before the final image is formed, resulting in a surface built from thousands of gestures of loss and repair. The drawings consider the power and paradoxical hope of the wiped out, the smudged, the erased and rebuilt.
Each drawing contains remnants from the campfires that fed me, kept me warm, or provided entertainment in my solitude. I am interested in these seemingly destroyed charred remains serving as the impetus for new ideas, images, and objects. This close collaboration with fire allows daily interaction with a force known for its ability to simultaneously destroy and nurture.
To see the rest of the featured artwork, browse through the published pieces here.
