Bio
New Orleans based artist TERESA COLE, known for her installation print work created primarily in relief and serigraph, exhibits nationally and internationally. Her interest in appropriating varied cultural expressions led to visiting artist engagements globally. Of note are her residencies at Hard Ground Printmakers, Cape Town, South Africa; Frans Masereel Graphics Center in Kasterlee, Belgium and Khoj Kolkata, West Bengal, India. Her most recent wall screen-print was commissioned by the Lamar Dodd School of Art at the University of Georgia in Athens.
Cole earned a BFA in fiber from MICA, Baltimore, MD and received much of her early printmaking education as a working member of Peacock Printmakers in Aberdeen, Scotland. Her MFA in printmaking is from the Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. She currently is a professor in the Newcomb Art Department at Tulane University where she teaches all forms of Printmaking.
Artist Statement
Essential to every society, pattern has been my subject of artistic investigation for several years. I strive to call attention to it as a language: a form of communication, abstraction, and embedded cultural identity. Examining the use of pattern to create identity as well as a means to distort, confuse and manipulate information, my works employ layering, enlarged marks, and magnified views to penetrate the malleability of sensory knowledge.
Through large print installations, I manipulate pattern to explore issues of power, unravel the past, and as a mode to interpret our complicated world. The works are relief or screen-prints that cover walls or cross into the three-dimensional, subtly defining space. Through the use of repetition, and the representation of space (both shallow and deep), I utilize optics as an agent of seduction to trace cultural expressions within the visual world. Relationships are formed between abstraction and representation, the simple and the complex, and ultimately the viewer and the viewed.
