About

Rebecca Pempek is a mixed media artist pursuing her MFA at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Before attending UNC, Rebecca worked as a teaching fellow at Phillips Exeter Academy in Exeter, New Hampshire, and taught a range of artistic disciplines, including painting, drawing, ceramics, printmaking, and 3-D Design. She earned her B.A. at Davidson College in Davidson, NC. There, received the Fujita Art Grant and attended several residencies in Iceland, where she studied the relationship between the changing landscape and Icelandic folklore. She has exhibited work across North Carolina and throughout New England.

I’ve never enjoyed playing games. However, there was one game that my family played that I loved, and I was good at it.

My sister and I would close our eyes as my parents drove our minivan through the windy backroads of Connecticut. Once we arrived at an undisclosed location, we’d open our eyes, and I’d give directions to navigate the car back home. Even in unfamiliar landscapes, I would be able to guide us back home based on the sway of my body as the vehicle turned, my keen sense of cardinal directions, and piecing together clues like the curvature of the road and mailbox numbers. This game was a practice of orientating.

In his essay I, Mercator, Stephen S. Hall proposes the idea of "orientating" as crashing through the larger landscape of memory, experience, and knowledge, trying to get a fix on where we are in a multitude of landscapes that together compose the grander scheme of things. Through this act of wayfinding, we draw our own meridians to make sense of a storied and ever-changing world. In my art practice, I employ Hall’s principle of orientating to understand environmental and familial histories. My work acts as a personal atlas. Hidden betwixt the layers of fluid paint, fractured shapes, and vivid colors are New England’s meandering stone walls, North Carolina’s blossoming sweetgums, and images of my grandmother in her garden. Through painting, drawing, cutting, printing, and collaging, layers of natural and personal histories coalesce into undulating compositions. .