About

Beth Skillicorn is a self taught fine artist, writer and designer, who has created works of art primarily for self expression. Her style is evident throughout all her works. She has created and developed many of her own techniques and unique mediums, from bas-relief carved papers to thick plaster frescos, from charcoal and ink drawings to pastel rendering on distressed clay board.

She best describes her work:

“Over the years, I’ve developed a visual language of symbols that I incorporate within my pieces. Many can be obviously seen in the imagery, others are layered or buried into the medium itself, kept secret.  These symbols serve as personal glyphs that I use to organize my thinking and to create a unity between so many of my varied mediums of expression.”

 By reading these glyphs, she’s able to revisit her earlier thinking and continue an evolution of thought through successive pieces.

“Before I start a piece, I first imagine a state of uncertainty, a dilemma. By setting the stage for interaction, by personifying ideas, giving them visual expression (glyphs), I try to visualize and then tell a story, script a visual drama.”

 By concretizing the imagery, the process becomes one of continual discovery for her.

“The glyphs are my personal language for myth making and, like any language, the meanings of each symbol take on new dimensions when juxtaposed with others. As I animate these symbols within a visual ‘landscape’, they may cannibalize, synthesize, or fornicate with each other to bring about new generations of thought, further drawing me to the center of truth, to significance.”  

Thus, her imagination is actualized and physically validated. She creates constructs of her thoughts by transferring mental imagery into an organic medium.

“It’s like capturing smoke in the wind. I’m able to set limits for the imaginings, the wonderings, going on inside of me. I put a fence around them through the use of a physical medium. I then study ideas, like stallions in a corral, trying to predict which way they’ll run. When the concepts jump one fence, I construct more to capture, study, and learn. The transfiguration of mental imagery from insight to outsight serves to solidify and validate my thinking. Without the analysis of the unconscious impulses coagulated through a select medium, a conscious awareness would remain unborn, it would remain smoke.”