Artist Statement

Influenced by the California Light & Space Movement and a background in dance, my sculptures explore the interplay of light, color, and movement. I use industrial metal screen as a semi-transparent canvas, which I paint and manipulate into lightweight encasements that react to each other and filter transmitted light. Much of my process draws from the Martha Graham School of Dance where breath is the wellspring of all movement. I manipulate the metal screen to expand, contract, and enfold into forms that appear between the inhale and exhale of a breath or the trajectory of a gesture.

My pieces are further activated by a viewer’s movement around them. Each sculpture is best understood as a composite of various perspectives. As one walks around each piece or redirects the lighting, there are transitions in how composition, shadow, and color are perceived. Overlapped colors blend, hidden passageways are revealed, and currents of moiré shimmer across the faceted layers. I’m inspired to create sculptures that are not only visually compelling, but also encapsulate this fluidity of movement within an otherwise static industrial medium. Through repeated viewings, my work offers shifting perceptions that illuminate both the dimensionality and ephemerality of light, color, and motion.

Biography

Nancy Ivanhoe is an artist based in Los Angeles. While pursuing her MFA in New Genres at the San Francisco Art Institute (2013), she explored the interplay of light and shadow by capturing the movement of shadow across her studio walls through drawing. With this work she was awarded the Murphy and Cadogan Contemporary Art Award (2012) and featured in New American Paintings, No 111, MFA Annual (2014). Since moving to Los Angeles in 2017, she has combined her exploration of light and shadow with her background in modern dance, to create sculptural forms of metal screen that explore the interplay of transparent color, shape, and movement and how these elements work together as metaphors for relationship dynamics. Her sculptural work has been featured on the cover of the 12th Annual Drawing Exhibition of Contemporary Drawing (2021) and the introduction of FOA Friend of the Artist, Volume 14 (2022).

Ivanhoe’s artwork has been exhibited internationally and commissioned works are in private and corporate collections. She continues to explore the intersection of dance dynamics with the spatial awareness evoked by static forms.