Website Instagram

Hello! I’m Colleen Albright, a multimedia artist and educator from Johnstown PA. My work consists of mainly sculptural work, with a small variety of accompanying illustration work. I’ve been primarily working with paper-machè since 2018, using it as a way to explore the space between the strange and the beautiful. My practice has recently entered a more experimental phase—focused on texture, intuition, and the slow, tactile nature of the process.

Exploring the relationship between the strange and beautiful drives my work. These two contrasting features work together to create a form that is intriguingly odd. Through my work, I am interested in the human experience and our connection with each other and nature. We are and have come from nature and there is a clear relationship that can further be explored by connecting these ideals. We have a collective experience that also breaks down to exist on individual levels. 

The body is a repetitive form and image throughout my work. The representation of the body is both for aesthetic interest as well as for conceptual reasons. Distortions of the human form are used to create the sense of a loss of identity. The figures can be interpreted as an entity, not representative of a person per say, but the soul or consciousness within. It is a goal of mine to reverse the roles of inner thoughts and exterior expectations. This is done by altering and manipulation of the physical identity of the body and covering the exterior with collaged imagery.  

I incorporate symbolic layers within my work to create a sense of depth and emotion. From a distance, the collaged surfaces appear to be a pattern, but as the viewer moves closer to new imagery, and meaning can be revealed. The colleges are composed of found paper and drawings, combined with the physical build up of paint and imagery mimicking the process in which we create our identities. As we go through life we are constantly collecting experiences and changing, and this process is critically important to my work.