Erika Lawlor Schmidt

Region: Northeast

Collage is a process of collecting and assembling disparate found elements and then reconstructing them into a wholly new experience. The work involves making deliberate choices and exercising meticulous editing, yet embracing the phenomena of chance. Of vital importance is a sense of compositional balance, relationship, and movement (even when the subject is stillness). My collage sensibility reflects one of the premises of Indian mysticism that can be described as the “unselving” of objects, dissolving the individual in a world of separate things by a vision of endless change. I am guided also by Zen principles of asymmetry; of not adhering to perfection, naturalness; simplicity without rhetoric, silence; equated with open space, and profound subtlety; lingering retrospection/memory.