Ann Stewart is a visual artist who uses drawing, painting, and installation to investigate the visualization of perception. Stewart received her MFA from the University of Michigan and her BFA in Painting from Auburn University. She has shown her work at Whitespace, Fay Gold Gallery, Spruill Gallery, Mason Murer Fine Art, Knoxville Museum of Art, Swan Coach House Gallery, Woodbury University School of Architecture, and the Jule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Art.

Artist Statement:
I have always had a fascination with trying to figure out how people make sense of things and attend to visual phenomena. How does what I see become what I know and what is the best way to visualize this translation? As a visual artist, I make work that documents this process.

In my research, I draw inspiration from the disciplines of art, cognitive science, philosophy, and architecture. Using the tools of mapping, patterning, and naming, as well as receiving inspiration from bottom up construction in which small interactions create larger entities, I produce forms that allude to living systems, natural phenomena, and architectural structures. In my most recent body of work, I use drawing to give a physical presence to the invisible process of perception. Through multiple small acts of adding and subtracting marks, I create an armature of lines that shape transparent spaces. By using a process of pattern recognition and pattern generation, both finding and fabricating forms, I negotiate the boundary between randomness and structure.

The imagery in my work is architectonic. The elements in the drawings swarm, merge, cantilever, float, implode, and explode. There is also a significant amount of negative space around the image clusters. With a small object on a large surface, the mind tries to predict what will happen next creating the possibility of implied movement and growth.