Lines for Winter is presented as part of the Natural Rituals Exhibit at Lansing Street Gallery. This work is a mixed media and includes: 24k gold leaf, sumi ink, graphite, acrylic, gouache, kozo paper on canvas. It is 25 1/2 x 31 5/8 x 2 inches framed.

Lines for Winter is one of six mixed media drawings on display as part of Natural Rituals and was originally from Generative Earth, a series made in 2023 and first displayed at Municipal Bonds, San Francisco.

The Natural Rituals exhibition brings together artwork from three Mendocino County-based artists whose studio practices are each deeply rooted in materiality, process, and place. Natural Rituals puts to the fore the tacit, meditative, and often ritualistic cadences that emerge from the body working with materials - an energetic transference that through time and process creates new and mutual forms. Firmly established in Northern California, each artist calls upon those environmental characteristics, combining repetitive mark-making with chance; guided by improvisation and observation while adhering to personal systems of control.

These works combine suminagashi (Japanese water marbling) prints created by variations in the wind pushing ink on the surface of water. These prints were then each overpainted with the same circular motif - the circle chosen for its allusion to a point of focus and continuous energetic movement; cross cultural symbolism of our planet and the cosmos. I relate to the circle in this series as a consistent gesture, my handprint, paired with organic and improvisational records of natural phenomena. Each piece also includes gilded areas of 24K gold leaf - the inert and luminous metal from neutron stars, using a contemporary gilding technique I use in my studio practice and offer lessons in.

Artist Statement: "My hope is for the work I am making to communicate a sense of perceptual movement and that within this movement, there is the invitation to ask questions more than a statement that quiets them – an experience that is more atmospheric than specifically defined. I look for this in nuanced material tensions and by pairing ordered forms with organic mark-making. Formal elements oftentimes reference and are created by the environments where I am working, and imagery emerges in a generative and reciprocal way, one element informing the next. In many cultural mythologies, the concept of a “creation space” is expressed as an ambiguous event out of which perception expands, and cultures are born, the outcome often unpredictable yet inherently full of hope. As an artist and educator, I feel deeply the importance of pointing to that space—which is at once ordered and chaotic, controlled and serendipitous—as a positive place of creative potential and possibility."

All Rights Reserved. Copyright, Solange Roberdeau, Lines for Winter 2023, Represented by Municipal Bonds