STORY

Deep in the creative process of artist Angela Turner Sanders are her early experiences as an immigrant. 

Constant mobility was the hallmark of her childhood. Each of her mosaic creations channels pervasive themes of time, place, a sense of loss and of discovery into a unique amalgam of smalti, shells, stone, and found objects.  

“When you are an immigrant, ‘home’ is your family,” she says. “Each time you move, it is the recollection of the last place that you take to the next place. Your memories become your comfort zone.”

Working chiefly in the medium of mosaic, with links to her formal training in painting and drawing, the art of Angela Turner Sanders today is both practiced and intuitive, an ongoing dialog between physical places and associated emotions, between the transience of lived experiences and our timeless inner worlds. One might call it the geography of memory.  Her color-intensive, abstract mixed-media compositions reconstruct remembered worlds through a filter of feeling, expressing her associations with places more so than depicting them. 

“These pieces are my attempts to express an emotional tension,” she says. “They are about the longing for home or the feeling of belonging to a place, and about finding yourself in the memories. It is an intensely personal process to reconcile it in a positive and universal way.”

Angela Sanders