Maureen Halligan is an artist, educator, and curator living and working in Santa Cruz, CA. Her work has been exhibited in Colorado, California, Rhode Island and Italy. She earned her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design.
Statement on growth|patterns series
"And finally, the things which seem like elements dissolve, and leave a fabric of relationships behind, which is the stuff that actually repeats itself, and gives the structure to a building or a town"
-Christopher Alexander, The Timeless Way of Building
Growth|patterns is inspired by the condition of not recognizing familiar surroundings of one's home due to increasing urban and suburban sprawl. These paintings appropriate the industrial grid, taking an inherently inorganic process and reconsider the suburban landscape as an organic space. Using appropriated aerial photographs of the California landscape, the image o f zoomed out grids of suburban housing developments provides the abstracted structure and base imagery. From here, the abstract grid is projected on the surface of the panel and instinctually moved around the surface, organized by various centers of growth. Layering, overlapping, erasure and constructions all have integral roles in forming these images, while they manifest suburban sprawl into an abstracted and organic pattern of growth.
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