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ARTIST STATEMENT

 

“…beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. God and the devil are fighting there and the battlefield is the heart of man.” – Fyodor Dostoevesky, The Brothers Karamazov

 

Living and creating on a farm in rural South Carolina, the serenity of nature permeates Sloan’s work. Her art practice is a contemplative pursuit in the visualization of the invisible, an exploration of that beautiful, treacherous battlefield within us. Maneuvering through the rooms of our inner landscape, she also engages our current times and her ongoing research into psychology, scientific revelations on nature’s deep design, and contemplative practices of the world’s Great Religions and indigenous cultures. 

 

Sloan explores her ideas primarily through oil painting, and both ceramic and virtual sculpting. Her artworks are influenced by her ongoing research and developing spiritual practice, and each one is an integral piece in much larger conceptual puzzle that is meant to crystalize over time.

 

Sloan’s paintings are a contemporary approach to Baroque painting where light is symbolic, represented objects are metaphors, and transcendence is unearthed in the most mundane of places. Her often monumentally sized pictures are hybridizations of different painting genres, and her varied approaches are demonstrative through penetrable landscapes, hyper reflective mandalas and magnified still-lifes.

 

Her more recent Mandala Series seeks to transform the signification of the subject matter (eg. bullets form a mandala) by combining Western symbolism (light rays, halos, crowns) with an Eastern meditation object – the mandala. Sacred geometry was used to find an ideal, visually balanced, infinite pattern – the dimensions of the concentric circles in the mandalas were found by dividing the radius of each circle by Phi (the golden ratio) - R/Phi squared, cubed and so on until the circles disappear into the center of the painting. 

 

Sloan’s stoneware vessels are inspired by the Southern craft tradition of the face jug as well as by female figures from various religious practices and histories. The figures are constructed with hand-built, wheel-thrown and plaster sprig mold techniques. She is currently making her newest sculptures in Virtual Reality.

 

Sloan’s current oil paintings are of reflective veils, garments and emergency blankets that mirror imagery from her studio, previous artworks, immigrants at the American border and scenes from the War in Ukraine. Sloan makes us question the importance of what is being concealed, revealed, and reflected back at us. 

 

Sloan looks to Baroque still life painting to peer, dimly, into the riddles of common experience – to find transcendence within the mundane; specifically, Zurbaran for using objects to reference an underlying person or narrative; Emma Webster for painting in theatrically structured virtual space, and Jay DeFeo for merging illusion with abstraction. The scale of her larger works function within a similar discourse Mark Rothko used to describe his pictures: “…you are in it, it is not a reducing commanding experience, but one that is human and intimate.”