Ghost Story
By maria haag

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artist statement:
My practice is focused on the idea of life as an unavoidable journey through which persons and societies are forced to travel. For me, the journey begins with suffering, seen as a sort of storm: a wrenching out of the common through a series of events, active or passive, which create a puncture in what is in order to open space for what could be.

The fragility of things and persons is what inspires my drawings, sweeping lines and crusted layers of paper, charcoal, paint and collage. I draw on my memories of growing up in the American Midwest, watching smoke curl up from burning fields, the green and brown swirling skies giving birth to tornadoes, and the ever-present wind transforming the waving grasses and carving away at the land and its inhabitants.