Exhibit Statement:

Kristin Gibson and Charisse Coleman met at a holiday art market, their booths across the aisle from one another. Taking an immediate interest and delight in one another’s work, they were soon meeting over coffee, talking art, life, and the idea kept popping up: wouldn’t synergies arise if they put their botanical works together, juxtaposing pieces created through radically different processes and using completely different materials? And, so, Rooted In Joy. 

The exhibit joins the work of two women at different stages of their artistic lives—Kristin an experienced painter, Charisse a developing eco printer—both with botanicals at the center of their art, a shared love for both nature’s beauty and the thrill of playing with color. 

Kristin commands a variety of painting techniques, highlighted by her skill in mixing color. Her alla-prima methods further call upon her talent and ability for working with spontaneity and improvisation as well as control (Charisse calls it “fearlessness”) to render her vivid, swirling paintings. Layers and textures, a sense of things in motion, varieties of scale, the freshness of plants and paint, as if the artist had just laid down her brush. In her gardens, still lifes, flowers and foliage, her great pleasure in interpreting their beauty in paint radiates from every canvas. 

Since 2017, Charisse has been refining her methods, experimenting with the endless variables that create the direct contact prints known as “eco prints” Plants pressed tightly against paper and steamed or immersed and simmered will release their natural dyes and tannins as color and image onto the paper. Results vary wildly depending on what combination of plants, mordants (solutions that bind natural dyes to fiber), are used. The eco prints in Rooted in Joy comprise Charisse’s earliest and “middle period” prints of leaves, both made by traditional simmering and steaming methods, and those from 2022 on, when Jane Dunnewold’s teachings for eco printing with a heat press made flowers part of the work for the first time. Some of the older prints are the newest creations, embellished with text. 

Rooted In Joy combines two artists’ sense of joy in the work, in the noticing and seeing, the rendering and playing, the interactions with nature, and in how experiencing nature in life and art can reminds us: we are nature, not separated from it.