Low Down Articles
Artist Profiles - Pam Connolly
Article 7 of 73
From the book Artists of the Gatineau Hill by Catherine Joyce. This article first appeared in the "Artist Profiles" column in the January 18, 2006 issue of the The Low Down to Hull and Back News.
Reprinted with permission. Search complete list of Low Down Articles.
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Open at the Heart of Being
Art is like a doorway for Pam Connolly, opening onto a world of vivid colour and surprising textures, where layers of reality spiral back to childhood. Working in her breathtaking studio at the south end of Meech Lake, she speaks about the process of making art as part of the long search for authenticity, "My work is psychologically based, exploring who I am so that I may better understand others."
Pam is best known for her tapestry-like collages, which are built up on rice paper with found materials, tissue papers of intense colour, embedded photographs and words, creating a sense of story - of mystery and symbolic consciousness. With the spontaneity of folk-art, each one glows like a jewel, a bouquet of flowers and birds, children and animals, within a painted frame of banded lines.
Her most recent series on Belonging continues her search through the themes of her life. "We all get stuck at the question of belonging. We struggle until we can make peace with it, until we can open up to new possibilities." Taking old photographs of herself and her brother when they were small in Quebec City, Pam creates ideal landscapes, whicn exude a compelling quality - that magic moment when all things come together to make feel one safe, secure. "These pieces are based on Maslow's hierarchy of needs - on the times when there is an internal and an external light glowing at the heart of your being and your life: you just are and you have everything you need."
Pam knows these moments are rare. She came to art eight years ago, a creative response precipitated by the ice storm and by the isolation of raising four young children in the country. Introduced serendipitously to the work of Norman Laliberté, the renowned artist from Boston, she reached out and contacted him - a gesture of admiration which soon became mutual as she tried her hand at collage. Over the years their correspondence has inspired and sustained her in the search for an increasingly complex understanding of art, of materials, of the development of the Self.
Pam has exhaustively documented the process, filling huge binders with photographs of her work from her earliest collages, through the years of teaching herself how to paint, down to her return to collage, now combining all elements of her search. In eight short years she has matured into a distinctive style, given shape to her life, to her space - filling her home with the work of many other artists - creating portals to new understandings with every piece she makes and acquires. She has exhibited widely in the Ottawa region in both solo and group shows, been featured on Regional Contact and selected for inclusion in The Canadian Fund, the collection of 24 Sussex.
A rich tapestry that draws her the influences and materials she needs in order to grow, her work has become a door, a welcoming window on the world. Colour, life, energy flow in.