Moments Journal, Honey Lea Gaydos, Mixed Media
Artist Statement
My creative work explores the paradoxes, ambiguities, and psychological dimensions of experience. This focus grew naturally out of my work as a professional nurse specializing in mental health. But its roots are in my childhood as I learned to express what was important to me with whatever materials I had to hand. Sometimes these were scant and not my first choice, so being creative was a necessity. After I became a nurse, hearing the life stories of people making their way through the challenges of illness, dying, and especially, through struggles with sanity, gave me a deep appreciation for the unique hidden dimensions and profound truths of each life. Meanwhile for many years, my own life seemed split, sometimes in painful ways, between nursing and art until I developed a way to tell the life stories of people through visual art. These Life Journey Portraits invariably became collages because collage perfectly expresses the layered, complex nature of memory. Fascination with the ambiguous narrative quality of collage led me to making interactive journals like the one in this exhibition and to creating collages to illustrate my memoir, Patterns: The Mystical Journey of an Ordinary Life, published by Atmosphere Press, (2024). Retired from teaching nursing at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, now I make art and write full-time. Though it may seem that making art and writing are quite different, to me they are synergistic, each informs the other, and in both, metaphor is my principal tool and beauty is my aim. Website: www.hlgaydos.com
