Due to COVID-19 precautions and Fairbanks Arts’ commitment to keeping our community safe, the gallery will remain closed to visitors during the month of May.

We are proud to present May’s exhibition online, featuring:

 

Fertile Darkness by Melanie Lombard

Exhibition available online beginning: Friday, May 1 at 6pm

 

 Anchorage artist Melanie Lombard’s work explores relationships between the natural world and internal experience. Melanie is continuously inspired by her time spent outside. When hiking or walking in the forest she pays close attention to the textures and colors of the landscape, as well as evidence of animals- especially nests, tracks, bones and feathers. When exploring her internal landscape through meditation and contemplation, she discovers an interesting wilderness experience all its own, with its own textures, colors, and weather systems. She works with this metaphor of inward experience as wilderness and finds that the internal landscape makes more sense when she lives in emotional and artistic balance with nature, sensitive to the changing seasons. 

This particular body of work came directly from the long, dark winter. The darkness of winter is like the darkness of the womb, and the darkness of the cosmos. It’s the nothingness that brings about creation. Each individual can have their own dark winter in their lives, often through the experience of grief or depression. These experiences that abandon us to our own darkness are extremely difficult, and it is possible to become completely lost in them. Yet, when everything seems stripped away, depths that we had never considered can be illuminated, in the same intimate and soft way that snow is illuminated by moonlight in winter.

– Melanie Lombard

 

 

You can see more of Melanie’s work at her website: melanielombard.com

Follow @lombard.melanie on Instagram

 

Pictured in featured image: Black Moon by Melanie Lombard