Thomas Ascott
December 18th, 2021 – January 16th, 2022
Artist Statement:
I honestly find the artist’s statement to be an almost impossible feat. I am a visual artist, so, by my estimation, my entire job is to communicate without words; yet, here I sit trying to put words to my images, an exercise I am poorly prepared to undertake. Inspiration, for me, is just my accumulated experiences, things I’ve seen, heard, touched and felt through my life, jumbled about in my mind and abused by time until they show up on a piece of paper. I would love to point to a sketchbook of ordered images that would tell this story, but, as often as not, the images are spit out on scraps of envelopes near a computer or a convenient napkin ringed with coffee. Growing up in East Tennessee, I spent a great deal of my childhood wandering through the Smokies, especially the Chimneys Picnic Grounds on the Little Pigeon River. I passed many hours of many summers scrambling over rocks in the middle of streams and exploring caves and trails. The Smoky Mountains and the Little Pigeon River are the internal background to almost all of my work. No matter what the central element of a piece may be, the natural flora and fauna of the Smokies creeps in, whether in the obvious form of a Smoky Mountain songbird or salamander, or in the less obvious form of rhododendron leaves and lichen-covered boulders.
