Estelle Louise Roberge

Alligator Juniper I, II, III
34″x36″; collage, paint, photograph; 2023

Estelle Louise Roberge
Magdalena, New Mexico, USA

STATEMENT

This body of work represents the culmination of twenty years of walking in the Magdalena Mountains, although also a meditation on certain European ideas of wilderness and of mountain landscape. On
certain levels, the painted collages simply reflect my time wandering, appreciating, and drawing in the Magdalena. On other levels, I work through 17th century European ideas of mountain wilderness, as
documented in Marjorie Hope Nicolson’s Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory, from which I took my title. In the simplest terms, my painterly/collagist process was to consider wild terrain as “simply beautiful”, sublime, and I am in awe of these mountain places. With color, shape, and texture of the high mountain desert, I abstract landforms. Yet the visual abstractions also embody subconscious wanderings of the mind, “active imagination” as Carl Jung wrote, informed at times by Nicolson’s research. As she notes, between 1600-1700, European summits were considered both attractive and terrible, sometimes viewed as “inhospitable, desolate, hostile, obdurate, always distant and remote.” By uniting the sublime, the distant, and the remote through layers of colored shapes, I combine two distinctively different attitudes towards wilderness and time.

BIO

Estelle Roberge was born in Maine, the sixth of nine children, and grew up in a Franco-American Irish-Canadian household. She graduated from the Portland School of Art and the University of Southern Maine in the 1980s and later traveled west in search of employment. She began her teaching career at Navajo Community College in Tsaile, Arizona. Later, she pursued an MFA at Idaho State University where she focused on wilderness desert landscapes in South Central Utah. After receiving her MFA degree in Painting, she taught in Maine and Utah. Finally, she made a home in New Mexico where she continues to reside.

Her interest in wilderness is interwoven in her ways of life. She has lived and continues to be inspired by the South West. These wilderness settings inspired her to abstract landscapes. She has camped and hiked through much of South Central Utah, the San Mateo Mountains and the Magdalena Mountains.

Her works have focused on the interplay of memory, place and presence within wild terrains. In 2022, she participated in “Putting the Pieces Back Together,” an exhibition at the Bristol Art Museum in Rhode Island related to Collage and she presented a selection of “The Book of Covid: Unbound” at Kolaj Fest New Orleans 2022. Currently, she is preparing for two exhibitions. She will be exhibiting a selection of her “Book of Covid: Unbound” at the Sun Valley Museum of Art in Idaho and “The Book of Cranes” at the Maine College of Art. Her work is in private collections in California, New Mexico, Maine, Massachusetts, Vermont, Idaho.

ARTIST CONTACT

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www.foundwork.art

IMAGES

Alligator Juniper I (detail)
11″x36″; collage, paint, photograph; 2023
Alligator Juniper II (detail)
11.5″x36″; collage, paint, photographs; 2023
Alligator Juniper III (detail)
11.5″x36″; collage, paint, photographs; 2023
Below and Along the Mountain
24″x48″; collage, paint, photographs; 2023