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STATEMENT & BIO

STATEMENT

My work celebrates the inherent beauty of the natural order of things—from the microscopic to the cosmic. As an artist with a background in environmental law and the healing arts, I explore interconnections in nature using mixed media and the experimental photographic process of cyanotype.

I often work outdoors using materials sourced directly from the surroundings, and allow time- and weather-based natural phenomena to influence each piece. When I bring these works back to the studio, I enhance them with meditative mark-making and the addition of pigments, inks, wax, and embroidery.

Engaging with materials that are responsive to the elements deepens my connection to each place, as I seek to represent the vast and the infinitesimal as a unified whole in my work. I also enjoy a sense of freedom in experimenting with materials and surrendering control in working with unpredictable elements.

BIO

Ann Holsberry is an artist based in the San Francisco Bay Area and Paris. Her work has been shown nationally and internationally, with solo exhibitions at the Morris Graves Museum of Art (Eureka, CA) and the de Saisset Museum of Art (Santa Clara, CA),  among other venues. She has held residencies at Kala Art Institute, Los Medanos College, and Le Cent Charenton and Domaine des Grands Devers (France). Her art has twice been selected for the City of Emeryville Art In Public Places Program, and is in collections throughout the United States and Europe, including the UCSF Cancer Treatment Center in San Francisco. Holsberry is a recipient of two Berkeley Civic Arts Grants: 2018-2019, and 2021-2022. Raised on the Gulf Coast of Florida, Holsberry received her BFA from Randolph-Macon Woman’s College in Virginia, and MRP and JD degrees from Cornell University. She practiced environmental law for 13 years before focusing on art full-time. Her work can be seen at Pierogi Gallery in New York City. 

Ann Holsberry grew up on the Gulf Coast of Florida, where she was strongly influenced by the culture of New Orleans. After finishing high school, she journeyed northward, receiving a Bachelor’s Degree in Fine Arts from Randolph-Macon Woman’s College and a Masters Degree studying design and urbanization systems at Cornell University. In response to the idealistic spirit of the times, she also earned a law degree, studying at Cornell and U.C. Berkeley (Boalt Hall). She continued to paint as she practiced law for twelve years in the San Francisco Bay Area, raising her son as a single mother during part of that time.

She eventually left the practice of law to devote time to painting and to the healing arts, including exploration of the body-mind connection, meditation, and using painting as a guide to the unconscious. From a desire to explore the transformative power of art, she began painting for process rather than the result, studying with the Painting Experience in San Francisco. She also worked as a Rosen Method Bodywork Practitioner and Movement teacher. She taught Rosen Movement in the U.S., Canada, and Europe and conducted classes in Painting Process and Movement.

In 2007, after fifteen years of exploring this process-driven approach, she began exhibiting and selling her paintings again. In this most recent phase of her work, she moves between abstraction and representation, often finding inspiration in nature. For the past two decades she has spent part of each year living and working in France, where she finds inspiration in the rich cultural history of Europe. Fittingly, much of her recent work is an examination of the migratory patterns of people and animals as they travel around the globe.
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