ARTIST’S STATEMENT

“My work is an extension of my experience, particularly of my inner experience of self-search, change, and growth. Segments of that experience relate to current themes of thresholds, walls, barriers, boundaries, and passages that investigate physical spaces that impinge on inner psychological space and allow an openness to the irrational. Squeezing this physical-psychological space forces confrontation with the inner barriers built for self-protection, as well as with the boundary between the conscious and the unconscious. These ephemeral barriers leave traces in memory and dream and pull from the collective unconscious. The process of tapping the energy sources of the unconscious evolves through manipulation of material. Processes of staking, interweaving, meshing, and their effects on dematerialized inner space give information on decision-making and reveal thought patterns. The immaterial funds the material”.

PROFILE

Ellen Phillips, MFA, has had fifteen one-person exhibitions since 1987. She has exhibited in STREETSITES San Diego and twice in Carlsbad’s Outdoor Sculpture Exhibition and has received two Meritorious Performance and Professional Promise Awards from SDSU. Her work has been seen in a one-person award exhibition in New York, the Lausanne Biennial of Tapestry, Emerging Artists – Riverside, and in many other national, regional, and local exhibitions. Twice she has won First Award at the San Diego Museum of Art Artists Guild Exhibitions and has received a NEA/CITY/COMBO Fellowship Grant. She has worked on a design team for Phoenix’s Indian School Road Widening/Canal Bank Project. In collaboration with J. and M.L. Dominguez she has built an interactive wall in tile and bronze for Children’s Hospital, San Diego and a poly-chromed wood mural for Malabar Library, City of Los Angeles. She and M.L. Dominguez completed FLIGHT/ALIGHT, seventeen bird forms for two Washington Street medians and with four other artists, three Children’s Hospital Oncology Play Gardens with a caterpillar bench, turtle climbing structure, an animal island river, fireflies that blink, and more. Phillips is design team artist with Kercheval Engineers for San Diego Dairy Mart Road/Bridge.