Bio
Anna Guillory received her BFA in Art Education in 2017, and worked as an art educator for three years. Alongside regional and juried exhibitions in the North Texas area, her work has been exhibited in Lincoln, NE and Seattle, WA. She is currently pursuing her MFA in Drawing from the University of Arkansas, where she lives and works.
Statement
Drawing is how I think. It is a stream of consciousness made visible, a way of processing what lies between my own experiences of directness and ambiguity, between what is said and what is meant.
Much like neuroplasticity—the brain's ability to form new synaptic connections through experience, learning, and repetition—my drawing practice builds visual pathways for my mind to maneuver. As behaviors repeat, the brain strengthens connections that become well-worn routes. My work functions through these kinds of “routes”, acting as evidence of internal conversations with my subject matter, existing as artifacts of ongoing examination and personal evolution, and presenting any meaning and significance derived thereof.
As the youngest in my family, I learned to occupy the position of the observer—to notice unspoken body language and familial dynamics. Though my observations have expanded beyond this familial space, my curiosity remains tender toward that which feels less visible - not on the surface of seeing - and interested in hidden functions and meanings.
I have come to understand this exploration as looking for traces or intangible gestures: the residue of experience, the footprint of the thing itself. My drawings attempt to materialize such ephemeral moments—a repeated utterance from the mouth, the digital impulse between finger and screen, the consistent recording of a body's presence through sunken fabric on a pillow. What is the potential significance gathered from these gestures when noticed over time? How does drawing guide attention through making such things visible? What does it reveal about how one, we, move through the world?
Accumulation of pencil marks become archives of attention, care, and thought as I bring form to these gestures—both the time I spend and the temporal nature of the content itself. Heavy-handed erasures serve as physical reminders of meaning's ability to morph and change. Words become illegible and blend into amorphous forms, revealing dimensions of communication that language cannot hold.
My materializations function as inquiry, attempting to not exist as a polemic, but make space for sustained attention in an age of material and image saturation, an invitation into thinking about the places where I've found significance lost in contemporary life.