PEARL DICK

ARTIST STATEMENT

Pearl’s work references relationships through the grouping or joining of figurative glass sculptures. These relationships are sometimes explicit in terms of the emotion conveyed by the intimacy of the connection, or hidden, in terms of the process that is essential but not obvious in the creation of the work. The importance of the group, the family, the community, is the driving factor in the creation of this latest body of work.

The “Bloom and Grow” pieces started with a group project Pearl initiated while a demonstrating artist at the Tyler School of Art and continued with Project FIRE in Chicago, in which she taught students to each make their own rendition of a flower out of glass to be incorporated onto one of her glass head sculptures. The flowers represent and honor the individual’s expression of beauty, community, creativity, peace, collaboration, growth, and future.

The singular glass head with flowers is a self portrait of artist as teacher and holder of influence.The smaller individual heads with a single flowers represent the students that are omnipresent in her life and process as well as what they each have to offer.

The pieces with the “carvings” embedded in the interior of the glass reference memory and dreams. These are the internal reflections of Pearl’s experience when she is alone with her thoughts.

Finally, the grouping of individual sculpted heads is a depiction of community. Pearl’s work is made in the presence of an entire community of artists, students, neighbors, and advocates who are all privy to and inevitably a part of the process. As this has become unavoidable in her particular artistic practice, Pearl is keenly aware of how this inclusion has affected that process and has incorporated it into the result. She does not create in a vacuum—the work Pearl creates is a reference of and is influenced by the community in which she operates. It is therefore a major factor in the relationships she celebrates and how she re-interprets that connection.

Pearl is an artist who creates as a means for expressing her passions, as a way to understand and interpret the interactions she experiences, and as a hope for people to appreciate our human connection.