Statement
My approach to landscape is conceptual; I use landscape to
convey more than a description of a place.
For the last several years I have been exploring the
intermingling of the domestic man-made with the natural, in
monoprints, mixed media paintings on panel, and drawings. I’ve
returned to forest images but have incorporated a semi-
transparent bed or a chair, furniture that was in an old house that
had been in my family for 90 years. Placing furniture from a
previous era in a forest creates a narrative uncertainty I find
fascinating.
In earlier work in this series, I made the furniture from
collaged, semi-opaque rice paper through which one can see the
forest underneath. Later I used paint rather than collage. I play
with the furniture's transparency and its location in the forest:
floating above, embedded within, or buried below. Over time the
furniture has become less substantial and less grounded. And in
some ways the various pieces of furniture become characters
participating in a narrative. My printmaking has strongly influenced these new works. In the
paintings I’m layering transparent colors with the (often surprising) color results found in my
monoprints, "printing" with paint, and using paint applied linearly, influenced by small drypoint
marks.
Recent drawings with graphite, Austrian Cretacolor (a black softish lead), and acryla gouache
seem more distilled than the paintings. In a large pieces, 90” x 80” and 8' x 9,' on wood panel, using
these drawing materials, with acrylic inks and washes, and thin oil glazes and paint. I keep the open
feeling of the drawings and explore how scale contributes to meaning.
Forests have long been scary places on civilization's edge, as well as of refuge and hidden
secrets, of solace and spirituality, of make-believe. I use these associations to create spaces where
the imagination can wander and memory can surface.
Biography
Prilla Smith Brackett uses landscape to convey ideas. Her current work, for example, explores
narrative uncertainties evoked by intermingling the domestic with the natural, setting semi-
transparent furniture from her grandmother's house within virgin forest imagery. Varying the
transparency of the furniture and its placing within the forest, Brackett creates spaces where the
imagination can wander and memory surface.
During fall 2010 Brackett's work was shown in solo exhibits at Farnham Gallery, Simpson
College, Indianola, Iowa, and at Hess Gallery, Pine Manor College, Chestnut Hill, MA. Other solo
exhibitions have included the “Uncertain Balance,” at the National Academy of Sciences in
Washington DC, and an exhibition,“Remnants: Ancient Forests & City Trees” which traveled to 8
venues in the northeast and midwest. Her work has also been displayed in the DeCordova Museum &
Sculpture Park, the Art Complex Museum in Duxbury, MA, the Portland Museum of Art , the Ashville
Art Museum, the Lancaster Museum of Art , and the Arnot Art Museum.
Brackett's awards include residencies at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Ragdale
Foundation, the Millay Colony for the Arts, and the Ucross Foundation, an Earthwatch Artist award in
Madagascar, and a fellowship in painting at the Bunting Institute of Radcliffe College. The 2010
publication of “Venus & Other Losses,” by Lucia Galloway, and the 2008 publication of “Mrs.
Ramsey’s Knee: Poems by Idris Anderson” each feature one of Brackett’s paintings in color on the
cover.
Her work appears in numerous public collections, such as the New Britain Museum of American
Art, the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard, the DeCordova Museum, the Art in US Embassies Program,
the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Radcliffe College, the Boston Public Library, the Federal
Reserve Bank of Boston, E. F. Hutton, Fidelity Corporation, Honeywell, and Shell Oil, as well as in
private collections in the USA, Japan, and Europe.
Born in New Orleans, Brackett has social science degrees from Sarah Lawrence College and the
University of California/Berkeley, and an MFA in drawing & painting from the University of Nebraska/
Lincoln. She lives and works in Boston.