The Space Between Nancy Andrews, faculty member in performance art and video production One thing that drives me as an artist is a need to make things: films, drawings, objects, assemblages, music, animation— forms vary—as a practice to keep me grounded in my realm of sanity. The process and engagement with making delivers me into what Mircea Eliade calls ritual time—a time that releases me from the world of the everyday into the world of mystery and transformation. Often my work with images, ideas, and materials is more intuitive and instinctual than intellectual or purposeful. Once the work has developed, I can make more sense of what it means. It is like dreaming—I create dreams while asleep and then examine them and gain understanding while awake. I am not saying that I go into some sort of trance in the woods. I research, read, learn, investigate, collaborate, and all of that is fodder in the process of making art. The questions that engage me center around the grey areas between binaries, like death and life; human animals and nonhuman animals; artificial and real. I am fascinated by the nature of reality and perception. I gravitate to big questions: What's it all about? and What does it mean to be a human animal? and What gives my life meaning?
Nancy Andrews, sketch on Anatomy by John Fotherby, 1729–30.
COLLEGE OF THE ATLANTIC MAGAZINE
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