My mixed media art, and the writing too, has a collagistic bent. I work with pretty much whatever media I can get my hands on so long as I can cut, tear, glue, scribble, draw, paint, spray, or pour. Sampling, remixing, and layering are my go-to methods. I’m drawn to found and vintage materials: flea market ephemera, discarded library books, antique photos, old clothes, unearthed text, childhood drawings. The tools I use typically use are inks, watercolors, acrylics, oil stick, and glue. Even when I dip into digital composites I privilege blending photos of my art and photography. It’s all about using tools in a spirit of intuitive and spontaneous play, a desire to be continually surprised by unexpected results.

Themes include the mysterious and whimsical nature of memory; solastalgia and the Anthropocene; and the cosmos as a metaphor for the imagination. Kitschy spiritualism, clairvoyant poetics, haunted houses, and the uncanny also make appearances. Throughout it all there's an ongoing itch to engage with the hidden, the unknowable, the flow of lost things via the mutation, morphing, and recombining of the remnants, and revenants, of one's physical and private world.

As for the writing, my publications include fabulist fictions, experimental poetry, memoir/ family biography, and academic research on writing pedagogy, arts-based research, and sustainability as a pedagogical ethic. I teach full-time at St. John's University, NY, and conduct workshops at the Art League of Long Island. I have an MA and Doctor of Arts from University at Albany, and an MFA from Transart Institute/Plymouth University. I live on Long Island, New York.

contact@derekowens.net