Bio
A native of Louisville, Ky., Lesley Patterson-Marx has lived in Nashville, Tn. since 2001. She has exhibited her artist’s books, prints, mixed-media, and textile works in galleries, art centers, colleges and universities across the United States, Great Britain and The Netherlands. Having been a student of Tarot since her youth, Lesley recently published “The Ephemeral Tarot: Tarot Deck and Guidebook”. Her work has been featured in publications including Uppercase, New American Paintings, Craft and ReadyMade, and can be found in the collections of Bainbridge Island Museum of Art, Vanderbilt University and Mississippi University for Women. She received her BA in Fine Art from Murray State University and her MFA from The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In her 25 years of experience as a teaching artist, Lesley has taught a variety of mediums at the college and secondary level, and offers adult community education workshops locally, regionally, and nationally.

Statement
Through the process of creating mixed-media artists’ books and works from paper and fabric, I express wonder at the connections between human life and the natural world. My work often begins in response to things that I find and collect, both natural and human-made. Through the pairing of these objects, images, and textures, I work intuitively, inviting the accidental and synchronous to reveal sublime mysteries that reside within the mundane. My subject matter arrives from the process of collecting: poring over old magazines, sifting through jars of buttons, arranging stacks of sepia and black-and-white photographs, and gathering bug-eaten leaves, four-leaf clovers and cicada wings that I find on daily walks. Arranging these and other items within my work reminds me that I am a part of something familiar and cyclical that would otherwise seem vast and unknowable. These collected images, textures, and objects reflect real and imagined histories when placed in a new context. A map becomes clothing on a figure; a leaf is rolled with ink and its impression is transferred to paper; a hand-stitched line becomes a gestural mark on top of an antique photograph. I am open to using any medium that is synchronous as ideas form, allowing ideas to spring from the processes themselves. In considering the variety of ideas that I embrace in my creative practice, I see that they are all connected by a desire to use art as a means of healing mind, body, and spirit, and to affirm the humanity of all people through our deep and abiding connection to one another and to the earth.