“Sally used to live here”
My dream job as a kid was to be a teacher. For as long as I can remember, I’ve enjoyed helping others find their way to an answer. I attended SUNY at Oneonta and graduated with a BS in elementary education and then thoroughly enjoyed teaching in Massachusetts, California and New York. After 5 years I decided to leave public school teaching and go back to college to pursue my other dream. I attended and graduated from The Art Institute of Boston with a BA in photography and found my new love. I managed a few jobs to start a children’s portrait business called, Kids At Home. It was a documentary style approach to photographing children. At the time I also taught high school students black and white darkroom photography. Though I loved and still love teaching, I knew I had to take a break in order to further my own art career.
In 2005, I moved to Providence and made my first fine art collection of work using mixed media and photo-transfer. I used boards, xeroxed photographs, acrylic medium and paint to create 13 pieces that focused on images I created while traveling through Ireland and Italy. Using multiple processes to make a piece, created energy and I soon became obsessed with photo-transfers and mixed media. The backgrounds were painted and textured, while the foregrounds were of buildings and imagery that I collected in my travels.
Today my process of creating art has changed from those first pieces in 2005, but all of them still start with a photograph. My camera is like a pencil that sketches out the beginning of a new idea.
I now think of myself as more of a storyteller who travels to new places and rearranges landscape and architecture to create a new reality. These places are collected and saved until they are called upon to help tell a narrative. These new realities are then printed on ink jet film and transferred to paper or boards where they are altered some more using paint, ink, paper, pastel and/or wax.
My current work can be found on my website, in Craftland, Rhody Craft stores and on the walls at
Chez Pascal restaurant in Providence. I have also returned a bit to my first dream job, teaching phototransfer techniques at Lyra Art Studios in Olneyville.
Deb Hickey
www.debhickey.com
