An MFA graduate in painting from the University of Washington, Virginia Paquette has worked and exhibited internationally. Her art responds to motion and memory, and is inspired by natural forms and phenomena. Winner of numerous public art commissions, Paquette has collaborated with her husband, Bill Smith, on site performance installations here in the Pacific Northwest and Seattle area, as well as around the world, including “Deluge,” created for Queen Victoria Museum, Launceston, Australia, “Saffeides” at Teatro Greco in Rome, and with ARTKOAMIA performance consortium.
For a recent residency at the Conservatorio di Musica in Bologna, Virginia created mixed-media works as part of a collaboration with Bill Smith. They presented her visual responses to his works of music, influenced by their years together in Italy. Paquette responds to Smith’s music with color, line, rhythm, gesture, and collage of found images, salvaged from the streets of Italy.
In my art I have sought to depict motion, memory and contradiction. I am drawn to the sense of objects and space on the move, of color and shapes and lines in flux. And sometimes the connection between the shape of nature and the shape of the human gesture is an inspiration: The similarity of the tendril, the curve of the hip, the cascade, the vocabulary of posture. I often work with images of movement, from natural forms and phenomena: rain, floods, “deluge,” the vortex and spill of moving water in defined spaces, whirlpools. The “memory” is transplanting visual cues from one place/time to another, perhaps fragments of classical figures or architecture – or “time fragments” from my own history.
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