About

Lori Anne Parker-Danley, Ph.D., is a visual artist and sometimes writer who lives just on the outskirts of Nashville in Pegram, Tennessee. She has her Ph.D. in philosophy, specializing in aesthetics and literary theory, from Binghamton University, Binghamton, New York.

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Artist statement

As a self-taught artist, I began with painting, a random act motivated by an unexpected craving for color in the midst of a cloudy New York winter afternoon in early 2003. To my surprise, painting immediately felt familiar and reminded me of dance. I was formally trained as a dancer, but thought I’d left that life behind. 

 

All these years later, and even as a textile artist, I continue to think of my work as a dance, and as myself as dancer when I work. Broadly, I am interested in finding and evoking the rhythm, color, musicality, and gesture of form while approaching my subjects from the inside out. I begin with the premise that everything (whether person, animal, non-living object, or emotion) has its own particular dynamism and texture. My work is an effort to uncover those rhythms and is essentially a conversation of body, expression, and gesture, a continual back and forth—between my body and my materials, between experience and reflection, between color and shape, between push and pull, and between one brushstroke, gesture, mark, motion, and another.

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In my work, I am looking for the in-between places, the moments one border or pulse converges to become something new, something other than itself. I question the boundaries we may be tempted to construct between biology and culture, nature and artifice, human and animal, self and other, and even self and art.

 

My intent is to work boldly and without hesitation, and to say yes to whatever my work demands. Though I typically head to my studio with specific ideas and questions in mind, my method is highly organic. Improvisation and spontaneity are central to my process. 

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