Artist Statement

Influenced by a waste-not-want-not upbringing, I urge you to ‘make do’ with the newspapers I use to create fine art collages with a chigiri-e technique and wabi-sabi aesthetic. With the amount of trees cut daily to produce newspaper, it is my mission to elevate this lowly product, and the viewers appreciation of the earth’s natural resources, to match the stature of the trees by slowly layering little bits of paper into big art.

Biography

Rhonda Barrett is an artist from Newfoundland with a background in Architectural Technology, currently living in Nova Scotia, whose study of paper and Japanese arts finds her working in a chigiri-e style with newsprint. The waste-not-want-not attitude and nostalgia of her maritime upbringing is paramount in her choice of medium and also informs many of the images she captures. The use of newspaper as her primary medium is a nod to the temporal arts and our ideas of material value. She works out of her studio in Halifax, NS.