Roberta Allen, a native of Boston, graduated from both the School of the Museum of Fine Arts and Tufts University. Her studio arts emphasis was in drawing and painting, but she soon expanded into other areas including collage, assemblage, sculpture, and most recently, printmaking. She continues to employ and combine many of these techniques into her current work. Fifteen years ago she and her family moved to Minneapolis where she joined a very vibrant art community that continued to shape and transform her evolution as an artist. After receiving a State Arts Board Fellowship in Sculpture in 2002, she decided to try something new and immersed herself in intaglio printmaking. This century’s old process continues to challenge and confront her knowledge of technique, process, ideas and materials and the many possibilities not yet revealed.
"Hanging in the window of my studio is a tumbleweed. It has traveled a long way to reach me, cramped inside a cardboard box, taking several days to return to its former shape. It’s a mass of tangled branches, twigs and seeds that has drifted across the plains, moving wherever the wind has taken it, gaining and losing pieces of itself, changing through no will of its own. It twirls, motionless except in an occasional breeze, glowing in the light like a gilded chandelier. The elaborate architecture of structures and forms intrigue and mystify me. I carefully follow a slender line as it spins into a web, grows into a complex system of arteries and veins, or knots itself into a tangle of grasses or tumbleweed. I yearn to go deeper into the labyrinth, explore the twists and turns of its passages, contemplate its shapes and hollows, penetrate and reveal its secrets."
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