"My spiritual practice is to walk in places where nature is allowed to assert itself."
Joyce Lyon’s work focuses on the intersection of place and memory. She makes oil stick drawings, image/text installations and artist’s books that are represented in public and private collections internationally, including the Minnesota Historical Society, St. Thomas University, Georgetown University Law Library, the Florida Holocaust Museum/Tampa, the Federal Reserve Bank/Minneapolis, and the Weisman Art Museum. Joyce was a founding member of WARM Gallery: The Women’s Art Registry of Minnesota. She has received grants from the Minnesota State Arts Board, the Jerome Foundation, the Minnesota Center for Book Arts and the University of Minnesota, where she is Professor of Art, emerita.
Artist Statement:
A friend in Oregon introduced me to the Alsea River, a wild and narrow river winding between Corvallis and the coast. The river is shallow and twisting. Different depths and strata of rock make for stripes of subtly different color. In my work, which focuses on the intersection of place and memory, usually I respond to places I know well, but the Alsea seduced me. The spring day was glorious, there was luminosity and shadow, a sense of the moment and of forever. The drawings in “the Alsea River” are the result.