artist bio
Noelle Suzanne Barce is a visual artist, curator and arts professional born and raised in the Pacific Northwest. She graduated from Portland State University, where she studied printmaking and literature, and worked as administrator at the Littman and White Galleries. She has worked for Oregon Contemporary, PICA’s TBA Festival, Lan Su Chinese Garden, Portland Japanese Garden and other arts and culture organizations, where she oversaw visitor services, cultural programming and gallery operations. She began as a pen + ink illustrator, creating images for local bands and creative producers in Portland. Around 2014, feeling conceptually limited by illustration work, she began experimenting with abstraction, inspired by the infinite combinations of color and texture on paper and canvas. Her interest in combining traditional craft work with postmodern aesthetics has inspired work on a new series using textiles and other fiber media. For the artist, the decision-making process involved in producing abstract art has a kind of purity; each choice feels like free will, and this is what makes it the only addiction worth having.* She currently works as a designer and custom picture framer, and lives with her handsome and three cats in Portland.
artist statement
My creative practice swings like a pendulum between intuitive, spontaneous gestures, and the slow, repetitive labor of traditional craft work . I make images that highlight and scrutinize periods of intense emotion that are essential to being human, and the struggle to control them. Shapes come into being as if on their own; there is no plan. They are impulsive and original, belonging only to their moment in time. Automatic ink drawings reference character-based languages, in which variations in mark making alter meaning, context and sound in significant ways. These forms suggest living minutiae magnified for observation, possibly mutating, captured in time. These “bodies” are corralled into the picture plane. They may be bound by lines or stitches, or enclosed by rigid shapes in an attempt to apply visual order to this chaos. A punk ethos comes through with textures reminiscent of graffiti, xerox copies, and gritty concrete. Patterns emerging from these architectures are fleeting; they are obscured, then revealed to the viewer, in repetition, as if for eternity.
*Quarry is a series of colláge paintings that explore the transitory nature of human emotion through the language of abstraction. It began in 2020 during a period of upheaval in my personal life. The world was responding to the global Covid-19 pandemic, while the forests of the northwest burned and ashes fell from the sky. It truly felt like the world was ending, both literally and metaphorically. In order to survive it I knew had to be able to see clearly through it, to shed negative influences and dependencies that inhibited my belief in myself and trust in others. Recovery from addiction meant confronting intense feelings associated with my own trauma, and also that of others. It was a laborious process, like a “mining” of my inner psyche in search of a core foundation from which to rebuild. While Quarry originated from this psychological struggle, it is not to be understood as a “result” of this process, but as multiple moving parts of an ongoing narrative.