“We need new fiction, babe
We need to find our own way”

– Yukimi Nagano

Identity is at the core of everything we do, yet we continue to struggle with that which can’t be organized in its own neatly labeled box. Black or White? Left or Right? High or Low? Art or Craft? As a mixed-race child of adoption, I’ve long found myself straddling spaces, experiencing dissonance between who I am and how I appear. I’ve lived a shade of the black experience; but I don’t feel black. My parents and upbringing are white, but I don’t feel white. As an artist, I’ve become driven to use my practice to explore and express the perspectives that grow in the gray in-between worlds that mixed-race individuals often inhabit.

I’m a story-teller and a visual communicator – I honed my visual problem-solving skills in commercial art, but the focus of my practice leverages hard-earned technical ability and a passionate love of both the so-called low arts and the canon of art history to locate myself in the field and forge a path ahead. I’m interested in challenging distinctions and discrepancies in contemporary art, and the super-flattening of culture in today’s hyper-connected world. I question how it can be that things are as connected, fluid and nebulous as ever and yet as starkly polarized as I’ve witnessed in my lifetime.

Exploring these ideas through dialogue-informed portraiture, abstraction, and semiotics is my way of challenging binaries. Shape and colour (or its absence), line and pattern, language and data are my tools, dimension and boundary my targets. Outsider subcultures are the font of my influence and inspiration, and global mythologies and schools of the occult offer insights into the threads between us. I want to follow those threads to their thresholds and pull on them to see what lies beyond, and maybe draw some new connecting fibres in their place.

– Andrew Patterson, 2025