Animals, Saints, Spirits, and Dreams: The Art of Mara Hincher

Mara Hincher is a multi-media artist who grew up in Mississippi and now lives in Philadelphia. She creates work that is whimsical and fey, inspired by old children's books and exploring myth and folklore themes with a wonderfully wry sense of humor.

Hincher explains that in recent years her art has drawn on southern folk motifs to express her love of "myth, magic and the unseen worlds that coexist with us simultaneously." She uses paint and other materials in combination with assemblage techniques utilizing vintage paper ephemera, antique bookplates and chromolithographs, arranged over original poems and prose created for each artwork.

"I'm completely fascinated and delighted by Victorian images of animals dressed as people. That plays right into my love of the absurd. Puns are just too easy to spin into art and vice versa. I suppose subconsciously I'm always collecting little bits of visual ephemera and secretly working on seeing how I can twist it around and put it with something else and make it really funny."

Hincher often uses patterns drawn from Victorian-era wallpaper, textiles, and tile designs. Her creatures themselves, she writes, "are completely original: puzzled together and re-composited from thousands of images: an ear here, a shoe there, a sleeve, a flower, a texture, a pattern. It may take as little as a few days, or as much as a few weeks, to create one Animal...after the grueling and laborious process of Research and Image Gathering is done."

She then partially constructs each piece digitally, trying out different colors, patterns, and layouts on a computer screen before transferring her ideas to the canvas. "My creatures are like paper dolls that I can dress and re-dress, and be the ultimate puppeteer with as I arrange and re-arrange them to my liking. [Working digitally] means I can play all day without making much of a mess. The real mess comes later, when I'm clipping and gluing and assembling the artwork onto canvas and the apartment is an explosion of acrylic paint bottles and powdery white drifts of cut up paper punctuated by splatters of antiquing varnish. I revel in the chaos of creativity, pause to breathe, and then begin again."

You can see more of the artist's work, which ranges from multi-media assemblages to "vintage fairy photographs" to dolls, on the Mara Hincher website. (Our thanks to Megan Webster for recommending this site.)

Comments

[Suzanne]

What beautiful images! I love the humour...I'm a bit late in posting maybe, as I've only recently discovered the Endicott Blog, but I'm having a quick look through past entries...fascinating!