Exhibition OPENS: April 1 - June 25

Opening Reception: April 22, 4-6p

As sentient beings, all humans and animals have common threads that connect us and create relationships. We depend on each other for food, water, and habitat. When any of these connective threads are broken entire species can vanish. I posit that this may extend to all living things, including plants and fungi. For example, even in the soil beneath our feet, mushroom mycelium combine to form a mycorrhizal network of incredibly tiny threads which connect individual plants together to transfer water, nitrogen, carbon and other minerals. In healthy forests, each tree is connected to others by this network.

We as humans need to nurture and strengthen all of these “common threads” to ensure that we, as well as others, don’t become a vanishing species.

In this show, I have included some compositions with unusual juxtaposition of humans and animals to reinforce how closely we are connected.

Vicki Hand

Vicki’s interest in art began in early childhood. When she reached junior high and high school, she took every art class available and won several Scholastic Art awards, the Junior Women’s League art competition and was a finalist in 17 magazine’s art contest. She majored in art and English at Western Carolina University. In later years, she continued to study with national and international instructors, such as Skip Lawrence, Christopher Schindler, Arnie Westerman, John lines, Chuck McLachlan, and Sterling Edwards. She is a signature and award-winning member of the Watercolor Society of North Carolina since 2002. Her works have been exhibited in state and national shows and purchased for private and corporate collections.

Vicki's work may be described as expressive and emotional, presented on her own terms. She works in mixed media, oil, clay, fiber, wood, metal, glass, etc. but has a special love of water media. She paints with an involvement with the behavior of the paint itself. It is the exploration of spatial relationships, color, value, balance, motion, and texture that conveys emotional feeling in her work. She works paint mostly wet in wet, enjoying the fluidity of water media. The resulting luminosity and imagination adds a spontaneous, playful, and reactive essence to her work.