Portfolio
For twenty years, Patterson has created geometric objects that embody a poetic, physical translation of place.
Early in her career, Patterson combined abstraction with observation using forms found in vernacular architecture such as billboards, signs, and barns as source material. Through a slow process of mining a site for information, she remembers specific places by measuring distance and observing light by drawing, filming, and photographing. By 2010, her method of constructing paintings, layering paint on canvas, stacking wood and paper, became primary to her creative process. She maintains her practice, often incorporating memories of observed landscapes into her constructions and isolating color events or single gestural marks.
Her work has been exhibited widely across the country with solo shows in Philadelphia, New York, Virginia, Maryland, North Carolina, Florida, and Minnesota.
“I responded to Patterson’s approach to painting: numerous discrete canvases that appear to be built into one… I also liked those broad bands of color asserting themselves over the whisper of unprimed or lightly stained canvas.”
Collections
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Matchmaker
Block Paintings, 2026
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Table of Contents
Collages, 2026
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Fabricated
Paintings, 2026
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24 Days in the Burren
Paintings, 2026
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Barely a Trace
Sketches and colored papers, 1992–2023
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From the Heap
Constructions, 2022
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Blink Tracking
Constructions, 2020
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Thread Stack
Collages, 2018
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Total Station
Constructions, 2018
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Light Box
Paintings & installations, 2016
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Mistaken Identity
Collages, 2009–2013
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Sign Series
Constructions, 2011–2013
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Mail Pouch
Constructions, 2013
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Locanda
Constructions & works on paper, 2012
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Property Marker
Constructions, 2012
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Quilt Paintings
Constructions, 2012
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Groundtruthing
Paintings & constructions, 2010
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St. Francis Xavier
Paintings, constructions, & collages, 2007–2009
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Between Fictions
Paintings & collages, 2004–2006
“In Patterson’s work, modular, layered colors and gestures are indicative of experiences of space and time. The gesture is measured in dialogue with geometry. She balances, or rather collides, indications of rigor and abandon, such as measured segments sometimes painted and sometimes inherently colored, which subdivide almost entropically, as well as the lavishly applied strokes, whose energy reveals on closer inspection a practiced and internalized prowess with the subtlest variations of her tools and materials. These dichotomies collapse and blend, as known categories withhold their pseudo-intellectual comfort and the viewer is left to experience, rather than evaluate.”