Featured Words by
Artist & Professor
David Finn
‘The artist Mhairi Treharne makes a world with art that is both personal and cosmic, as well as exquisitely crafted and highly expressive.Treharne’s art is poised between painting and sculpture: We encounter a structure made with inflected, worn materials like slate or wood, punctured, or drilled, and knitted with peripheries of wire, shaped to remind us of the ultimate status of art as a physical object --- and then we are pulled in, to the deep center of the work by evocative, fleeting, painted images, often a remembered landscape or a fragment of life. I like the way this artist simultaneously honors both vision and touch. Treharne’s work moves in and out of abstraction too, but it is her personal connection to the land, people, and animals she knows that gives her work a feeling of intimacy, value, and of love for the subject. These subjects are given space and intensity by their central position, and from the ‘working’ of the periphery which serves to frame and ‘protect’ them.
The great paradox of scale is that small things often evoke an immense, almost cosmic sense of space and time. Mhairi Treharne’s art seems like it could have been made long ago, and yet it reflects the deepest bonds we make with the world that sustain us in this age of rapid change.’
Professor and Chair
David Finn
Department of Art
Wake Forest University
Wake Forest University is a private-research university in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, United States. David Finn has had over 15 solo exhibitions, including shows in New York, London, Milan, Hong Kong and Lund, Sweden. The recipient of fellowship grants from the Bemis Foundation, New York Foundation for the Arts, North Carolina Arts Council and the National Endowment for the Arts, he has created a number of public art projects in North Carolina. Finn is a Professor of Art at Wake Forest where he has taught sculpture since 1987.
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