Chroma

In 2019, encaustic artist Caryl St. Ama, painter Margaret Lazzari, mixed-media artist Nancy Kay Turner and I began a collaboration with color as our common ground. As part of the Hana Kark Collective, each of us worked on our own to make 25 birch plywood panels, 6" x 6" each, in every primary and secondary color. We started with blue, intending to work our way through the spectrum. Without a clear idea of how we would assemble the work or where the process might lead us, we began. Each color took on a focus and process of its own; click through to see each one.

Hana Kark creates transformative art experiences, for viewers and for the artists who make the work, through a collaborative process that is at once prescribed and spontaneous. This was the first project in which each artist worked separately. The collaboration happens in the hanging. Each artist's 25 panels make a complete 30" x 30" work on their own, but the panels can also be separated and rearranged in unlimited configurations: by color, by artist, or scattered into a mosaic of color, texture and text, in a formal grid or snaking around a gallery wall.

We've exhibited the work three times, twice curated by the artists and once by an independent curator. Interior designers and collectors have made their own arrangements too, sometimes combining several artists and sometimes choosing just one. Like a workshop, it's a room of separate hands that becomes something shared. Like a mended garment, it's never finished: each new arrangement adds a layer to its story.