Olan Quattro

ARTIST STATEMENT

Unknown Places is my current series. It looks at the construct of home as a vessel that both entraps and frees the inhabitants. It examines the active life of the imagination. This work continues with my exploration of memory and displacement, both geographical and emotional. As a third-generation artist, my inheritance was the paper debris of my ancestors. Their scribbled notes and melancholic photographs are embedded in my work. My family history is a strange mix of secrets and myths, from sea captains to suffragettes and communists and commune dwellers. My family settled on Cape Cod thirteen generations ago. Hurricanes and Nor’Easters were the marking points of years. My mixed media pieces offer a topography of memory. What is visible and what lies beneath. Paper is a material of memory, its thin sheets holding secrets, sharing dreams. My family’s faded papers are my palette. Collage is my way to tell stories, to write poems, to paint pictures. Collage is how I make sense of the world.

BIO

Olan Quattro is a third-generation artist. Her grandfather was a painter who studied in France at the end of the Impressionist period. He was very much a traditionalist and when my father became interested in abstract expressionism it caused a serious rift in their relationship. Quattro’s parents exchanged her father’s paintings for the costs of her birth at the hospital. From this beginning, she grew up between two artistic communities on the central California coast and in Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Everyone in both places was an artist, performer, musician or writer. It was through this unusual upbringing that Quattro formed her own artistic voice. She studied art in art centers and residencies in France and Mexico. She has exhibited her work in galleries across the country.

ARTIST LINKS

Website: www.olanquattro.com

Instagram: @OlanQuattro