Mixed Media + Collage Artist
Currently living in Floyd, VA

I run a shop + blog called Paper Whistle with Robert (my love).
Member of the WAFA Collective.
I love mail — please feel free to contact me.

Bio:

Brandi Strickland is a 26 year-old collage and mixed-media artist based out of Floyd, VA.  She grew up in North Carolina and graduated with a BA in Studio Art in 2007 from Queens University of Charlotte.

She creates small-scale works of art using techniques of hand-cut collage, painting, and drawing.  Her compositions range from simple and impactful to sweepingly ambitious and hyper-detailed.  Even while manipulating found images, she manages to create enveloping, otherworldly landscapes.  Although collage often lends itself to a certain cleverness, her pieces remain heartfelt and revelatory.

There is a narrative quality to her work that explores the human condition.  She assimilates myth and metaphor with the mundane and everyday to create images which depict incarnation, ascension, love, struggle, disasters, initiations, illuminations, transitions, celebrations, separations, epic journeys, and long-awaited arrivals.

Statement:

For my most recent series, “The Other Is Looking In On You,” I set out to create dense landscapes populated with many tiny figures. These figures represent human beings, but also elements of the Other: manifestations of earth, animal, and plant spirits, gods, aliens, and interdimensional beings.

These figures interact, playing out familiar narratives of love, struggle, transition, travel, illumination, celebration, rituals and rites of passage.  Often they act as hidden hands, taking on the role of attendant, teacher and helper within the terrestrial plane.

Blending the natural and the supernatural, the scenes depict a composite view of the world. A view in which our everyday experience is peeled back to reveal the sacred and unseen forces all around us. With this veil lifted, our environment is shown to be infused with spirit, manifesting as figures, patterns, and rays of energy.