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Terri Phillips

Artist Terri Phillips has been writing for Been-Seen for a while now, so we thought you might like to know a little more about her… First of all, she's been an artist since she was very, very small. As she tells us, 'I began making things by accident, as gifts for people when I was young, and also making things out of gifts that were given to me… a butterfly my cat brought me became a small sculpture.'

She lives in Los Angeles but gets a lot of inspiration from places she travels to.
'I try to go to some place I've never been each year. I am never without my camera. It has become an extension of my hand. I would like to someday live on a boat. I built a spaceship with a landscape inside the craft,' she says, 'for when you must be a mental traveler. This was called “The Sea Beneath Which She Sleeps”. I am currently working on a project about the battle of Shiloh that took place in 1862 in Western Tennessee.'

Another work, 'The Joyous Lake' (above and below) is a combination of cocktail and highball glasses filled with blue liquid over and over and allowed to evaporate. As she explains, 'This causes the colored sediment rings around the glasses and gives a sense of the passage of time. Looming overhead are clouds made out of old wedding dresses, and in the corner are two large cockroaches painted gold and hanging on a string dangling above the lake.'

Terri's attitude to art is organic, something which others don't always understand.
'I have been accused of making things that will not last a lifetime,' she says, 'and out of materials that can disintegrate while you are looking at them. These are also questions I have for myself. I would like to create something that will last forever. Even if it is just a love. So my work does have something to do with time, but it is also to do with connection, essence and history. It is always my intention to communicate even with a language that doesn't necessarily utter a word.'

2007 Mar 31 no responses. share this

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