Teresa Stanley

Teresa Stanley was born in Los Angeles and spent her formative years in Southern California. Teresa received her B.A. in Studio Art at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and her M.F.A. from U. C. Berkeley. She subsequently relocated from San Francisco to Arcata, California to take a teaching job at Humboldt State University, where she taught before retiring a year ago.

Teresa’s mixed media abstractions utilize acrylic, hand painted collage, silkscreen and graphite and reflect her interest in botanical forms as expressions of loss, change and transformation. She is currently represented by Bryant Street Gallery in Palo Alto, Blue
Gallery in Kansas City, MO, Troxel Art Projects in New Jersey and LaFontsee Galleries in Michigan.

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In this recent series of mixed media works on panel, I depict strange plants that are either housed in sheltering greenhouses where they have been left to adapt to an artificial environment, or struggling to grow in hostile and impossible situations, in between cracks and crevices in buildings, sidewalks and asphalt roads.

The plants I depict seem successful in adapting to their new reality and can be read as reflections of our own precarious position in a rapidly changing environment. Will we also have the ability to adapt to the threats posed by global climate change and and will the fragile natural environment we depend upon continue to sustain us? In the future,
once there are no wild places left for propagation, will we only experience nature through specimens conserved in artificially constructed environments? Or will plants, with their clever ability to adapt, survive us?
Preferring to work within the language of abstraction, my botanically inspired subjects drift between recognizable forms and pattern. Although abstract, my work is firmly rooted in the realm of things and ideas and is always connected to a sense of narrative content.