Patricia Anders

Biography

Patricia Anders is a contemporary artist whose practice moves fluidly between painting, sculpture, and mixed media. Working from her studio, she makes pieces by hand — slowly, attentively, with a deep interest in the way materials carry memory.

Her work has been described as quiet and patient. She is less interested in spectacle than in the kind of looking that takes time: the small revelations of light across a worked surface, the way a hand-built form holds its own weight, the conversation between figure and ground. Each piece is the result of an unhurried process of layering, scraping back, and listening to what the material wants to do.

She has exhibited her work in galleries and group shows, and her pieces are held in private collections. She continues to make new work from her studio, where she also teaches occasionally and collaborates with other artists, writers, and craftspeople.

Outside the studio she keeps a notebook of fragments — colour swatches, scraps of overheard language, photographs of skies and walls — which finds its way, transformed, into the work. The practice and the looking are not really separate.

Artist statement

I make work about attention. The paintings and sculptures begin with something small — a colour, a gesture, the way light fell on a wall one morning — and then I follow it until it becomes something I did not expect. The making is the thinking. I am not illustrating an idea I already have; I am trying to find out what the material has to say.

What I care about most is presence. I want a piece to feel as though someone, or something, is there. Not a story, exactly, but the residue of a long looking. If a painting or a sculpture can slow a viewer down for even a moment — invite them to stand quietly in front of it — then it has done what I hoped it would.