Fragments
Copyright Mari Kimura Goldberg. All rights reserved.
My artistic projects frequently relate to the social and environmental issues I am currently interested in: animal rights, climate change, water conversation, equal pay, poverty, etc. These issues are not just areas of intellectual concern for me, but of ongoing practical engagement. For example, I am involved in many community service and social service organizations. While these organizations have diverse purposes and methods, all begin from the conviction that individual behavior and contributions can make a substantive difference to the solution of problems of national or even global scope. Thus I strive to make my art an outgrowth of my larger concerns and activities within my community, and I want my art to be an outlet for people to learn about these issues.
The unity of my social and artistic concerns extends beyond content and subject matter to form and process. I carry over the methodical, systematic manner in which I plan social actions to the way in which I execute my compositions. Each step is meticulously arranged and the entire sequence of steps from beginning to end is mapped out from the start. This is necessary in part because each work is effectively destroyed upon completion and then rearranged and rebuilt from the ground up by cutting the original into strips and then creating a pattern or design from the pieces. A lot of my creative impetus thus emerges from this tension between the highly ordered and move fragmented elements of the design process. My preferred media are graphite, charcoal, ink, and acrylic paint.