From River to Ocean:
Artists Respond to Environmental Impacts
Ann Holsberry
Website - https://annholsberry.com/
Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/annholsberry/
Ann Holsberry grew up on the waterways of the Gulf Coast of Florida, where she was strongly influenced by the culture of nearby New Orleans. She attended Randolph-Macon Woman’s College in Lynchburg, Virginia, where she majored in Fine Arts. She taught art in public schools for several years, and went on to earn a Master’s Degree (MRP) in urbanization and regional ecosystem planning at Cornell University and a law degree (JD) studying at Cornell and UC Berkeley. She continued to paint as she practiced law for twelve years in the San Francisco Bay Area, raising her son as a single mother during part of that time.
She eventually left the practice of law to devote time to painting and to exploring the body-mind connection through meditation and using painting as a guide to the unconscious. From a desire to explore the transformative power of art, she began painting for process rather than the result, studying with the Painting Experience in San Francisco. She also worked as a practitioner of Rosen Method Bodywork and Movement and taught workshops in Painting Process and Movement. For the past two decades she has spent part of each year living and working in France, where she finds inspiration in the country’s rich cultural history. Accordingly, much of her more recent work is an examination of the migratory patterns of both people and animals across the globe.
Her work has been shown in exhibitions nationally and internationally, with solo exhibitions at venues including the Morris Graves Museum of Art (Eureka, CA) and the de Saisset Museum of Art (Santa Clara, CA). She has held numerous residencies, and her work is in public and private collections throughout the United States and Europe. Her work has twice been selected for the City of Emeryville Art In Public Places Program, and she is a recipient of two Berkeley Civic Arts Grants.
As an artist with a background in environmental law, teaching, and the healing arts, my work celebrates the inherent beauty of the natural order of things, in scales ranging from the microscopic to the cosmic. I explore the intricate connections of the natural world using mixed media, in particular the experimental photographic process of cyanotype. I often work outdoors using materials sourced directly from the surroundings, and allow time and weather-based natural phenomena to influence each piece. When I bring these works back to the studio, I enhance them with meditative mark-making and the addition of pigments, inks, wax, and embroidery. Although references to the natural world or found materials serve as my starting point, I am often reaching toward something more ephemeral and fleeting—toward the realm of things that are sensed but unseen.
My curiosity about the mysterious, unseen world of the imagination led me to study (and eventually teach) Process Painting, a method that gives greater rein to the unconscious. This process-driven approach has allowed me to integrate the internal world of emotion and the unconscious into my symbolic-realist representations of the natural world. Engaging with materials that are responsive to the elements deepens my connection to place, as I seek to represent the vast and the infinitesimal as a unified whole in my work. I also enjoy a sense of freedom in experimenting with materials and the surrendering of control inherent in working with unpredictable elements.
My recent focus is on sea kelp ecosystems, and I use kelp from California beaches to create small and large-scale pieces. In these works, I seek to capture the power and mystery of the ocean as well as the beauty and fragility of kelp forests.
Kelp Forest 1 & 2
Cyanotype on paper
72” x 38” each
2018
$2800 each or $5000 diptych
Unchartered Waters + New Directions
David Brower Center
Berkeley, California
June 9 – August 31
Video time: 4.39 minutes
Wild Places
David Brower Center
Berkeley, California
July 1 – September 30, 2020
Videography by Tina Toriello and Sonja Murphy
Music by Christ Zabriskie “Oxygen”
Video time: 2.59 minutes