About
abby (dot) s (dot) flanagan (at) gmail (dot) com
Bio:
Flanagan is an artist and educator based in Western Massachusetts. Her practice traces interconnections between environment and self, moving across drawing, sculpture, and installation to explore subjects of materiality, presence, and precarity. Flanagan completed a B.F.A. at Montana State University in 2015 followed by an MFA from the University of Texas at Austin in 2022. Her work has shown with galleries, art centers, and artist run projects such as shedshows in Austin (2024), North Loop in Williamstown (2023), NON STNDRD in St. Louis (2023), GrayDUCK in Austin (2023), Tinworks Art in Bozeman (2023), among others. She has participated in artist residencies at SOMA Summer in Veracruz, MX (2021), Orein Arts in Elmira, NY (2019), Burren College of Art Alumni Award Residency in County Clare IR (2016), and Mildred’s Lane in Narrowsburg, NY (2016). She has written for arts publications including Incandescent and served as visual art co-editor for the Bat City Review. She currently teaches Drawing in the Expanded Field at Amherst College.
Statement:
I make drawings that speak the language of sculpture and walk the threshold of performance. My research often brings me into the field, where I invite collaboration with site and seek out underlying patterns that shape my surroundings, such as marks left by flood lines, traces of prehistoric weather, signs of aquifer depletion, and sounds of bird calls. My process is one of gathering, sorting, counting, and mark-making, often composing with dirt, debris, and other materials I find in relation to site. I work with granular matter as a means to extend acts of noticing; to amplify the very living residue of our human and geological histories. My processes unfold in systems-based works and iterative series that manifest as works on paper, objects, and architectural interventions. Underpinning my work is an inquiry into what is lost and gained through abstraction and translation, and the possibilities found in states of change.