STATEMENT
All my books are about the working of the mind, sadnesses, pleasures, and the way ideas, color, shapes and forms interplay and are a part of each individual psyche. If I listen to the different layers in my mind in a small segment of time, I can find these images.
BIOGRAPHY
Nancy Azara is an artist and feminist educator best known for her large-scale wood sculptures and mixed-media collages. Nancy developed, and continues to work in, a distinct style of sculpture – found wood, carved, ornamented and mounted. Instinctive chip carving peels off an outer layer of wood, reaching for an essentialized raw experience of the body, of the limbs, exposing flesh and blood. This work explores life cycles, utilizing the metaphor of tree for personhood. Egg tempera, often in reds and pinks, and aluminum, palladium, gold gilding recover these exposed layers, exploring folkloric stories of women’s roles, goddess imagery, ancient symbols, mystic spiritual traditions and affirmation of female self.
Nancy continues to make and exhibit work from her studios in Tribeca and Woodstock. She is constantly challenging herself and her community in quarterly intergenerational feminist dialogues, (RE)PRESENT, an outgrowth of NYFAI, The New York Feminist Art Institute, a school she co-founded in 1979. Here, she formalized automatic journal drawing for a class she taught called “Visual Diaries, Consciousness Raising Workshop” as a way to access the unconscious. This method quickly became popular as a feminist consciousness-raising technique and was embraced in the nascent feminist art community in New York and with groups like Redstockings.
Nancy holds annual workshops, teaches, and mentors other feminist artists, sustaining a unique visual, experiential and pedagogical artistic practice that remains informed by the body, nature, spirituality and her experience as a woman.
Nancy Azara’s Website
