Artist Statement

Sgraffito drawing is my calculi to interrogate human
frailties. It is a manière noire technique. Wood
panels are sealed with acrylic, layered with kaolin
clay and an acrylic binder, then airbrushed with
India ink. I cut and scrape through the black ink
and into the white clay with knives, and other tools
that abrade the surface. Each intrusion pulls light
into a dark field.

Death became my lodestar when I was seven-years-
old. The Teton mountains hurled my oldest brother
into an abyss. The neighbors fared worse. Father
and son disappeared into the Snake River. Six
months later, a U.S. Army experimental reactor
exploded at the National Reactor Testing Station
where my father worked. Three died. Whatever was
left of them was sealed in lead coffins and shipped
to faraway cemeteries. My family had no words.
My works range from research-based examinations
of medical practices that construct and threaten our
humanity, to eye-witness dissections of carnage in
Ciudad Juárez, México. I am here to remember and
to honor the dying and the dead, to probe and
uncover death's machinery, and to remind myself,
vita brevis.

For the past 5 years, day and night, I drift through
the house in Charon's boat with my 103-year-old
mother, as her mind unravels. Her companionship
brings me ever closer to the limits of understanding,
to the edges of the known world, to finis terrae.

Email: aliceleorabriggs.art@gmail.com