I am an oil painter. My focus is on abstract expressionism, using color and gesture to embody certain feelings and sensations. My work is based within my intuition and what I am naturally inspired by. Nature is something that has always held great meaning for me. During my adolescence trees were some of my only companions and friends. I channel my mark to manifest that feeling of wilderness. The paint becomes what I am observing and responding to in the creative dance of emotional landscape. With my work I am attempting to give shape to memories I have been trying to recall but do not possess. What the absence of memory and self looks like, the space it holds in your body. I use an abstracted window symbol in my practice to create an off-kilter atmosphere that is recognizable but is itself an irony, a representation of home and its nonexistence. I was once unaware and unknowing of the world. Seeing others share their pain and vulnerability in their art has greatly helped me to open my practice; to feel no longer alone. I hope to give others a feeling of not-alone by speaking and creating from my own experiences.

My name is Merewyn Wirth. I’m from many different areas in the Pacific Northwest and currently reside in Seattle. I grew up moving from one place to another isolated from larger society for most of my life. When I decided to start at UW it was the first time I had really been a person in my own right in the world. Terrifying and painful, to realize what I had been kept from and what beauty was around us. Art to me was something I knew I had a small ability for, but I was never strong enough to pursue it before I came here. My father was an artist as a young man. As I was growing up his mental illness severely deteriorated until it took the man I knew as my father. I was deeply scared to be like him. So I ran. I ran from anything to do with him or confronting my past. To acknowledge how alone I was and to face my trauma only happened for me when I began to paint. What truly allowed me to step onto this path was using the last letter he ever sent me and collaging its enveloped surface as the ground in two paintings. I had a symbol of my history to paint on, to talk with, to scream at. The thing I was so afraid of became the very thing that saved me. I realized it was not selfish or wrong to examine what I came from and who I am. It is human. Art is how I confirm my existence in this world.