Dorothy Netherland
Artist’s Bio
Dorothy Netherland was born in Alexandria, VA in 1962. She began studying art in her mid-thirties, after a move to Charlotte, NC. After relocating once again to Charleston, SC, she received her BA in Studio Art in 2000. She began painting on glass soon after the birth of her daughter in 2002. Since that time she has continued to expand her work on glass. Her work has been included in exhibits at the Greenville County Museum of Art and the SC State Museum. She has exhibited in group and solo shows throughout the southeast, and was recently named Artist of the Year by the Columbia Contemporaries of the Columbia Museum of Art. This summer, she participated in an international symposium of artists in Neustadt an der Weinstrasse, Germany, which concluded with a group exhibition. In 2012 her work will be included in the book 100 Southern Artists by Ashley Rooney.
Artist’s Statement
Making drawings from pictures I find in vintage women’s magazines helps me explore my ideas about family and identity, the distortion of memory, and transience. Working in reverse on two or three panes of glass which will later be stacked together, I make multiple overlapping drawings with ink and acrylic paint, continuously scraping away and re-applying new imagery and color. My work has evolved to include imagery which is scraped, painted, screen-printed, ink transferred from my past paintings, and etched onto the surface of the glass.
The predominantly figurative imagery in my work is not arrived at through a sense of nostalgia, and I don’t feel as though I’m making cultural observations, or contrasting the comparative innocence of a past time with today’s ironic self-awareness. The people who populate my paintings are transformed from their original context as product sellers into my cast of characters, who now seem to be conveying ideas about self-hood. I am responding to the idea of the past as something which is interpreted, rather than remembered. I am interested in the ways in which we frame our own personal narratives, and the power of the imagination to fill in the blanks. I find it fascinating that our current identities are culled from such vague recollections. Underneath a slick surface, I suggest associations which may be false or intangible, like fragments of memory.