Pamela Gibson AD Infinitum

Pamela Gibson’s wide-angle lens on natural life translates into a body of work at once intimate and resonant. By her hand, the cadence of time translates into layered marks as intricate as the phenomenon she acutely observes outside: the ephemeral encounters, the changing flora, the beautiful decay, the variable pacing of time, time’s imprint on memory and manifestation in organic matter. These are all affects present in her paintings. Working in a spectrum of sizes—from small squares to ambitious boards—she explores the breadth of time through the depth of materiality.

For Gibson, art exists at the alchemic crossroads of place and time, intellect and emotion. Ever exploring the rugged world that surrounds her, she processes her experiences in place through her art. In her studio, she absorbs and interprets. She collects cues from music, poetry and photos. From her studio window, she ruminates as she monitors the ever-changing scene outside. She follows the light. She observes and orders shapes as they change. She responds, whole-heartedly, to living amid wild nature in conceptual context.

Encaustic painting has become her filter, informed by all the creative forms she finds inspiring: literature, media, adventure, as well as her previous work in fibers. Amid the whirling world, she pulls out moments of profundity—ideas that make sense of the current chaos. Ideas that continue to accumulate and communicate, in ever-surfacing affect, on the walls of collectors’ homes.

Finding pause in the temporal flood, Gibson builds her paintings as narratives. She never starts with the easy plot, the iconic vista, instead focusing on the essence of the landscape, its lessons—how a patch of willows scores a field, how a boulder disrupts an evergreen stand. Landscape as point of departure. Countless paintings live beneath the surface of each finished work, traces of her expectations subsumed so that the composition can become itself. Hers is a process of liberation—of painting and painter. Worked and hard-won yet resolutely serene, her abstractions stay with viewers long after the initial encounter, inviting layered readings. Meaning rises from their complexity and poetics, viewers’ memories and associations. A conversation started by her hand, then continued by collectors—a limitless dialogue between aesthetics and experience, material and humanity.