Art: Mia Pearlman

I always loved looking at clouds. It's the whole act of gazing at the sky and going into a dreamy trance. And the depth and the texture of clouds are so varied! Their translucent quality suggest endless and infinite possibilities. Which is why I was so delighted to find Mia Pearlman who does cloudscape paper sculpture.







Her process is included here.


(photo: Catrina Genovese)

Mia's Artist Statement:

"My work is meditation on chance, control and the ephemeral nature of reality. The forms in my work exist on the brink of being and not being, free from physical constraint. Imaginary landscapes are shown frozen in mid-evolution, on the brink between contracting or expanding, solidifying or breaking apart. My goal is to find the picture beyond the big picture, the space between the nucleus and the electron, the moment between creation and destruction.

The CLOUDSCAPES consist of cut paper installations, graphite drawings and paintings on paper. They depict a seemingly sublime cloud world ulcerated with internal vortexes, mutating from within, a non-human narrative of destructive force within a weightless paradise. By removing an earthbound referent, the CLOUDSCAPES remove the “land” from “landscape” and transform the viewer’s role from potential inhabitant to alien voyeur.

Bubbles of paint are the actual mark-makers in the BREATH PAINTINGS, large-scale or multi-part paintings on paper. Using an assortment of handmade and store-bough wands, I blow bubbles of paint onto paper, adding painted and drawn linear shapes to highlight both the depth and artificiality of this invented cosmos. Process-driven and unpredictable, they depend on a combination of chance and design. Titles the BREATH PAINTINGS are borrowed from the poetry of Diane Ackerman.

Several themes link the BREATH PAINTINGS and CLOUDSCAPES. Both clouds and bubbles teeter on the brink of nonexistence, substantive yet physically insubstantial. Together they symbolize exhalations and inhalations of space, and can be interpreted as micro- and macrocosms of each other.

These works are my reaction to the overwhelming knowledge we now have of every aspect of our world, from the tiniest nanoparticles to the incomprehensible vastness of the universe, and the way this hyper-awareness is simultaneously awe-inspiring and soul-crushing. They evoke environmental chaos, physical instability, and infinite destructive forces beyond our control. "