about j.e. paterak
about j.e. paterak [she/her/hers]
Painter, metalsmith and curator J.E. Paterak earned her MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan, and a BFA with honors from Massachusetts College of Art. She has been working in various modalities as artist, jeweler, designer, naturalist and sometimes cultural catalyst (CitizenSalon, Guerrilla Gardener, Artists in Conversation, Architalx board member). Her work is in numerous private collections throughout the country as well as in public collections most notably at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Both her writing and work have been published in American Craft, Metalsmith Magazine and several Lark Books and Brynmorgen Press books. She has been awarded grants from Maine Arts Comission, as well as residencies at Monson Arts, HewnOaks, Bowdoin’s Kent Island Science Station among others.
She is a co-owner of Zero Station Gallery in the East Bayside neighborhood of Portland. Zero Station is an independent gallery with a creative legacy celebrating TWENTY FIVE years this January 2025. She has be directing and curating for the gallery almost exclusively since 2020. Paterak lives and works in Portland, but has life long ties to midcoast Maine.
artist statement:
Plants have almost always played a role in my work. I began as a landscape painter, migrated to working with metals, for a time found objects and books played a central role in my object making. I am also a student and admirer of design, but ideas need a form to work through, plants are also an apt metaphor for all aspects of life.
Botany has taught me to recognize the intelligence of plants; their spatial movement following light, gravity, water, the intricate design of their reproductive mechanisms, how they coexist in community. The wonder expands as I continue to learn. How a transverse section of a plant ovary, mimic formations of sound vibrating grains of sand on a membrane as in cymatics. The Blashka brothers’ glass flowers and seeds first seen at Harvard’s Peabody Museum: magnified and vitrified specimens continue to inspire. Like this family of artisans, I aim to reproduce the unspoken sense of wonder in each work that I make.
The act of painting a plant is one of quiet observation; taking time to sense its habits and patterns of growth. I understand a plant with a gesture of my brush, which becomes more a portrait than scientific document, yet exists in parallel. The painting documents time and place, seasonality. Is the plant currently in a stage of budding out, setting fruit or withering in cold, from insects or disease or simply time to quiesce? Each stage is a period of magic transformation on a cellular level that we see with light moving through our optical nerve, sensing the vibration of the varied spectrum of greens. How does what an artist create correlate to how a scientist does their work? I grapple to understand. My work and my questions, are not unlike all the scientists, artists and naturalists that came before me; beginning with the initial step of wonder. The second step, is observation. The third step is less visible, it is pulling thread, interweaving what we see before us with things we have learned or read. Creating a matrix of known and unknown, seen and unseen making a thing from nothing.
Whether our work is wholly new or merely an iteration is not a concern we should have. Rather, do we have a role to instigate a modicum of change for the better in a world tainted by problematic reasoning and exploitation.
