Artist Statement: Joan d’Urban Mullins

My work is an archaeology of the visible world: an act of building meaning through accumulation, collision, and the unexpected life that materials take on when they are given freedom. Working in mixed-media collage, I repurpose studio cast-offs, dryer sheets, tracing paper, perforation strips, and found fragments, layering them against painted canvas until the surface becomes something like a stage: dense with incident, alive with tension, perpetually unresolved.

 That theatrical inclination is not accidental. An earlier career teaching literature and theatre taught me that meaning is rarely stated; it is implied. Characters group and regroup, scenes layer over scenes, imagery competes for attention until something essential emerges. I bring that same compositional sensibility to the canvas. When I move fragments of material across a surface, I am doing what a director does: placing figures and objects in relation to one another, watching for the moment when the whole becomes more than the sum of its parts. My painting is dramatization by other means.

 The materials themselves are protagonists. I am drawn to what has already lived: the used, the discarded, the overlooked, because these carry a history that new materials do not. A dryer sheet, a selvedge, a torn scrap of tracing paper: each arrives already marked by time. When I adhere them to a surface, and paint around or over them, I am not erasing that history but adding to it, creating a record of encounters between materials, between cultures, between the vast landscapes of a Southern African childhood and the vistas of the Northern Hemisphere that followed. My work holds all of it simultaneously, as memory does.

 I have progressively moved from representational to abstract painting, and that move has felt less like a departure than a deepening. Abstraction does not abandon the world, it gets closer to the texture of how the world is experienced: as accumulation, as juxtaposition, as perpetual change. My love of the natural world, of landscaping, of art from the prehistoric to the contemporary, all feed the same appetite: for the moment when disparate things suddenly cohere, when chaos organizes itself into something that could not have been planned. That moment, surprising even to me, is what I am always working toward.