Website: https://www.marycozens.com
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mcozensart
Mary Cozens Bridges graduated from Western Carolina University with a BSED in Art Education and MFA in 2015, and currently lives and works in Asheville with her husband and two boys. She has extensive experience teaching art to all ages, from pre-school to undergraduate students, most currently as an Adjunct at A.B. Tech and Central Carolina Community College. Over the years Mary has organized several community arts events and workshops and is always looking to infuse art into any and all environments. Her mission is to create and also inspire others to see the importance of the arts in everyday life.
Mary specializes in 2-D practices, mainly based in gestural drawing, water media, and printmaking and has shown art in several galleries here in town and also abroad. Her work ranges from dense large scale mixed media abstracts to intimate playful watercolor botanical studies-however, both approaches are inspired by ornamental design, movement, and the natural world.
Through intuitive drawing and layered imagery, Mary explores themes of beauty, patterns in nature and the boundaries of our physical/psychological environments. Decorative ornamentation, floral excess, redundancy and maximalist tendencies fill the work as a reflection of our contemporary culture. Play and process are essential to her work as she constantly constructs, builds up, and deconstructs each piece, mapping a visual timeline of the battle between freedom and constraint. Whether it be the aggressive nature and primal act of drawing or the use of different tapes/medias to build up a piece, we see the rough, raw and open nature of the relationship between the studio process and the artist at work.
