The larger paintings are reactions to what I’m discovering about myself as a person, parent, and artist as I continue to cycle through the fluid, dynamic, interconnected set of macro and micro processes of healing. They are statements of acknowledgement and declarations of affirmation synthesized from what was initially gathered and processed on paper. With larger paintings, I am able to combine dance movement with color, line, and form to physically release what I was forced to suppress as a means of survival during my childhood and adolescent stages of growth and development.

Drawing on inspiration from Toni Cade Bambara’s The Salt Eaters, utilizing more space to paint also enables me to create a much wider healing circle that I can invite the memories and spirits of the women in my maternal lineage into; inside the circle I lock hands with the mothers, grandmothers, aunts, and cousins I was born from. We laugh, we cry, we shake and dance, we wail and trouble the waters of our lineage, allowing each movement and utterance to release generations of suppressed emotion. In the circle there is no demand to endure, only the invitation to express what we’ve been forced to withhold. Each painting here is a container of our shared release and revelation of what’s being re-written in our cellular memory now that freedom is ours to embody.

— A'Driane Nieves

In my practice, I use paper to create studies and reflective meditations. Just as Julia Cameron describes morning pages as a tool for cultivating creativity and personal transformation, utilizing paper in my practice is an exercise in visual stream-of-consciousness journaling. I am able to capture thoughts, emotions, questions, random ideas, internal monologues, research, and all of the other noise playing on an endless loop in my head. Sorting it out on paper through experimentation with mark making, drawing materials, composition and color enables me to approach making larger work with more clarity, a cleared channel to my subconscious and less resistance to what intuitively surfaces. 

I use paper as permission to get out of my own way. Whether torn from my sketchbooks or pulled down from my studio walls, this latest series of works on paper are a compilation of notes and meditations on lineage and ancestry, epigenetic and genetic expression, and the process of letting go of past pains in order to transmute sufferings into more expansive healing in the present moment.

— A'Driane Nieves