In The Educated Imagination, Northrop Frye distinguishes between environment and home. Environments are places we inhabit out of necessity. Home occurs when we have achieved the illusion of control over our environment; the grass grows here; weeds don’t belong in the grass—control. Once humans have what they need and are settled, they start to think about what they want. The impulse to build homes and communities is followed by the development of things like art and culture in general, which, like the home, is an invention. Unlike the home, art has no functional utility. If we don’t have art, we might be ignorant, but ignorance is survivable. On the other hand, not having a place to live or things to eat is a much more precarious state than being without art. 

My latest work examines the assumption that our homes and machines are distinct from nature, or that we behave as though they are. We build fences, sidewalks, roads, foundations, sewers, houses, grids, communities, theatres, surveys, apartment complexes, etcetera. The world we build lives on top of the environment that was once without communities and homes. As climate change accelerates, we are reminded that our manufactured states are temporary and ephemeral and that the earth will reclaim it all. 

My work contrasts the chaos of the organic with our machine-made order, and the viewer is reminded of this dichotomy. This dichotomy is both frightening and beautiful. Once we settle down, we want beauty—control—but our will conflicts with the will of nature. We want control, but it is illusory. One need only look at places like Chernobyl to see nature metering out its order. Art is the ultimate symptom of this desire to control. Art’s utility is that it shows us to ourselves, and forces us to ask certain questions: What does it mean to be natural? Are manufactured and natural objects discrete from one another? Where does the natural world begin and end? Does the manufactured object suggest control? When the natural encroaches on the manufactured, are we losing control? Is art a form of control? These questions will be asked and answered differently by each viewer. The work, in the end, is about the viewer—you. 

— Pat McDermott, May 2024

Sonnet Paintings

Humans often categorize their experience: exciting/boring, abstract/representational, black/white, boy/girl, etc. The Sonnet paintings dwell in the spaces between categories. The paintings possess a photographic quality, but what they depict is not certain. This lack of obviousness raises questions: How are they made? What is being represented?

In the Sonnet Paintings, I have tried to depict the abstract with clarity— to explore a world that has not been seen. Because I have depicted a world that the viewer does not know, the viewer is free to really look. The observer feels the relationships, tensions, quandaries, dilemmas, support, and warmth that exist within the work and themselves.


Painting Statement

Paintings often represent physical things. Upon seeing a painting that does not appear to represent something, the bewildered viewer asks: What is it? Language comes out of a need to name and share the world and our experience of it with words that represent concepts, ideas, and things. Attaching words to objects and ideas represents a failure of sorts. Beyond the experience of day-to-day existence, there are moments one experiences that are beyond language, beyond articulation. Everyday language is functional and necessary for our day-to-day lives. Art has no value in terms of this everyday utility. It is difficult to create something that does not at some point refer to our physical world and our system of naming it. A thin line that stands vertically is a tree or a figure. A thin line that runs horizontally across a page is often seen as a horizon. The physical world is with us and in us, and so is language. The failure of this naming system is reconciled with painting. When painting negates the naming system of language, painting becomes an experience for a prospective viewer and a challenge for a prospective viewer. I am interested in creating an experience in the viewer that conveys what it feels like to be alive, without using words to describe this feeling.

Letraset Drawings

Drawing is a process that reveals its own making, both to the artist as it is being made and to the viewer as it is seen.  One sees many crosses and dashes in a Van Gogh bush. The viewer is made aware that Van Gogh is not just mimicking a bush with line; he is creating a language to describe the bush and developing a conceptual approach to representation. The idea is bound to the aesthetic. In my work, marks do not just suggest objects; marks are part of a language that reveals a process and an approach.
The shapes in my Letraset drawings deny what they are made of (The letters are submerged), yet we recognize aspects of them. My drawings employ a readymade (Duchamp) medium (Letraset). While they expand the medium’s original intention, they still employ part of that intention as a narrative and as something obliquely recognized. I am using one system to describe another, but part of that original system is never completely submerged.

Wax Reliefs

My wax reliefs deal with the discrepancy between what is seen and what is understood. The viewer thinks that she is looking at fabric, only to discover that the fabric is actually wax. Things are further complicated by the fact that some of the objects used in these works are real (human hair, needles, rusted steel, stone, etc.). In this regard, my work also deals with the nature of perception. In the past, artists were concerned with painting as a document of reality. My reliefs are documents, but in the tradition of Realist painting, they are also illusions, as they are wax and not real fabric. In Realist painting, the viewer knows that they are looking at a painting, but in my work, the viewer does not automatically know what they are viewing. I want to slow the viewer’s understanding to make the work keep going in the experience of the viewer.