The exploration of “movement through space and time using textiles as a drawing tool, creating labor-intensive meditative works that recall natural wonders, landscape, and psychedelic visions, exploring relationships, touch, intimacy, and tactility.” Yes, please! This is the colorful, meticulous, I-wanna-touch-it work of American artist Andrea Alonge. Her recent artist statement is a beautiful look at where most of us are at this very moment:

“Our lives are colored with human interactions and relationships. We build lines of intimacy with each other and our environments. We hope to see ourselves reflected, catch a glimpse of a familiarity that spurs us to bridge the distance between us. In a time of digital interactions and a need for physical distance, our concept of distance becomes heightened yet blurry – we see and interact with each other and our environments through a screen. Sharing a physical space is something we all crave, yet out of necessity we are forced to translate the experience of the physical into the digital. We are finding our way through the unknown, the compulsion to touch, the need to meet even if in a truncated form, and the balance between isolation and socialization. We are more aware of the physical presence of others, the distance between us, and the subtle ways we have to communicate care for others because of the danger of getting too physically close. Our environments and nature have become solace, we can still touch the trees and the sand and the water. Our bodies are grounded in different relational indicators, and our intimacy now takes a different form. If we’re lucky, we still have someone we can touch and receive the chemical and tactile stimuli so necessary for our sense of well-being. A thought that comforts me is the idea of our connections to everything through our chemical makeup – we are made up of the water, and the same elements as the stars and the trees, and the air that we breathe, and our universal consciousness. We are all touching. We will touch forever.” 

Sigh. I needed to hear that.