Anne Bedrick

Artist Statement

For as long as I can remember, I have felt like a fifth wheel — almost inside the circle, but not quite. That feeling lives in every figure I make. It's why hands recur across my work — reaching, pulling, protecting, claiming. They are how the world touches us, and how we touch each other. In my work across both painting and sculpture, the distances between figures — who is inside, who is almost inside, who is watching from the edge — have become the subject itself.

My paintings hover between figuration and abstraction, navigating inner and outer experience. Their scale envelops the viewer, insisting on the physical experience of standing before them. Figures emerge and dissolve into watery ambiguity, the suggestion of bodies surfacing and submerging.

In She Was Me, a woman consumed by the hands of others reaches across time toward the girl she once was. In Kite String, a pregnant mother holds onto her children, while feeling completely separate. And in Wait, Me Too, a third figure reaches from outside the circle, hand extended, wishing to be included in the experience of the conjoined pair.

My five-painting series Fall of Freedom: Women's Testimonies moves through the experience of women's bodies under threat — seized, fragmented, fleeing, reconstituting, and finally raising a collective voice. It is political work that arrives through the body rather than through language, insisting on the physical and emotional fact of what women's lives contain. The series is offered as a complete unit only. The works are currently unstretched; wrinkling visible in any images will resolve once stretched for exhibition.

Together, my paintings and sculptures form an ongoing inquiry into human connection, vulnerability, and the traces we leave on one another — the weight of hands, felt long after they have lifted.