About the Artist

R.A. Fedde is a filmmaker, visual artist, and yoga teacher who is endlessly fascinated by the magic of the mundane. In any medium, she's seeking to tell a story along with, rather than to, the viewer. She paints everything from fluorescent cats to strange quarks. Her abstract mixed media works invite viewers into pattern recognition. Some see maps, alien terrain, cells under a microscope, distant galaxies--and all of these interpretations are spot on. Her documentary work has shown at SxSW, Slamdance, Telluride, and many other film festivals, as well as broadcast on HBO, PBS, and others. Her 2018 feature, Five Faces of Shiva, has played to audiences around the world. The film combines her interests in mythology, fine art, mass media, and travel. Her drawings and paintings have shown at various New York City galleries and elsewhere. She is a graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design and also enjoys travel, competitive fencing, and poetry.

These sunset paintings were created during a March 2022 residency at the Arteles Creative Center in Finland. I assigned myself to capture the sunset at the exact minute of the upper edge of the sun's disk touching the horizon, according to astronomical tables, as a way of marking the precious, fleeting days of the residency. Each evening I had an alarm set for a few minutes before the given time and--no matter what was going on at the time: cooking dinner, meditating, working with other residents--I dashed out to make my sketch. The perception of the sunset from day to day of course varies widely depending on cloud cover and atmospheric conditions. I hope the series captures something of the ephemeral nature of that moment of the day's last light.


Quarantine Cats

During the pandemic, I was lucky enough to be able to stay home and threw myself into work. Through uncertainty and emotional ups and downs, my two cats became the bright spots of my days. These Quarantine Cats are to transform the endless sameness of lockdown into something--perhaps--magical. The minor chaos of a small apartment turned workspace, pantry, and broadcasting studio came to reflect for me the greater chaos outside. Yet the felines cared only that there were more things to climb on and explore. Their moods of curiosity, affection, and sheer disdain for me came to color my daily life. This series attempts to capture all that desperate, dreamlike oversaturation. I also adopted a habit of picking a tarot card each day, asking, "will everything be ok?" So I titled each piece for those archetypes. Finally, incomplete, blank spaces allude to lost hours of midnight doomscrolling, memories we might wish to forget; and simultaneously memories yet to be created.


Blood Drawings

Blood is a potent symbol. Our ancestors sacrificed blood and flesh to appease the gods. When we spill blood in our modern world, we take particular care in reverence to its power, arming ourselves with rubber gloves, germ-killing agents, and the like. Blood evokes an immediate, visceral response as nothing else may. And with good reason: it's the stuff we're made of.

I began this series as an exploration of map-making on the boundaries of reality and fantasy. The territories I map here are both internal and external. They reference an idealized topography of an imagined terrain, which is born only by my drawing--or your looking at--it. And they are maps of internal spaces: cells dividing endlessly and chaotically (my mother's cancer), cells sloughing off before you can try to measure them (friends' hiv diagnoses), all the strange processes of our bodies which medical science tries and often falls short of fully explaining. Finally, they are each a meditation. They carve out a quiet space for me in the endless chatter of our connected lives. The repeating patterns which suggest themselves to me in the impressions of dried blood are also a mantra of hope, a quest for discovery through contemplation. They map other possible worlds, the quantum universes next to ours that might spawn on the smallest turns of chance, and the landscapes of imagined other planets we could someday call home.

A note on process

These works begin with blood on paper. I often monoprint using a liver or heart directly on the page. Other times I dribble blood onto the page and let it pool or drip; I either leave it alone at this point or press a second sheet on top forming two blotted monoprints. The blood dries overnight. Then I draw on top as the patterns suggest themselves to me.

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