My work addresses parallel themes of Native American cultural reawakening and human kinship with the natural environment. In it I directly illustrate the organic beauty I find in the elements and invoke the concept of cultural transformation, often using southeastern mound culture designs and concepts.
Surprisingly, my overall style is influenced by traditional Chinese painting techniques, which I studied in Beijing as a teenager. This disciplined training taught me to capture the random configurations of trees, mountains and water and to portray the essential contrasts found in nature.
Being of mixed ethnicity, I see mixed media as a form of reconciliation, where the unsettled fragments of my eclectic life experience are sewn together like sections of a patchwork quilt. By making use of the versatility of digital technology and photography in combination with conventional hand-rendered artwork, boundaries between mediums blur to create hybrid art forms. A conceptual merging also takes place through the distillation of organic patterns, human and animal depictions, spiritual/metaphysical content and cultural references. Through these processes multiple layers of meaning unfold to tell stories of old and new.
I believe that artists of any background can play a key role in bringing people face to face with their history and culture by recounting and recovering what has been forgotten or seemingly lost. As memories and visions emerge in my consciousness, the process of creating becomes a vehicle for ancestral awakening and reconnection. In turn, this inspires me to communicate a universal message of transformation and rebirth by affirming earth consciousness and the coming together of our one tribe; the human race.
-Alyssa Hinton