Shelley Thorstensen, who lives and works in Pennsylvania. As her printmaking is a duet between in tangible and tactile, her artwork is a physical representation of consciousness: a duality of body and mind, physical and mental, heart and soul. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Royal Museum of Art, Antwerp, Belgium; the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; the Woodmere Art Museum, Philadelphia, PA. She is an ongoing NEA Research Artist at Kansas State University in Electrolytic Chemical Etching and recently exhibited in Portraits of the Brain: Visualizing Behavior: Lehigh University Art Galleries, Bethlehem PA. She is the Director of Printmakers Open Forum.
She writes about her work: "My work is a result of the confluence of inner and outer stimuli. It's a result of personal narrative as much as observed affect. It derives as much from experience as it does from answered and unanswered questioning. I think about the connection between the manmade and what we call natural, the extension and overlap of each modality. Sometimes in my work, things are sure footed, sometimes less so. The forms evolve, they turn and I rely on a sense for which I cannot
find a proper name to hesitate the turning, to coalesce a given form. Because I work in the medium of the hand pulled print, color and form can be separate investigations into meaning, effect, response. I am very comfortable with that fluid hierarchy: where form and color are unlinked and either can assume a dominant role, which is not determined until I call the print done."
