I love writing artist statements for other artists. I hate writing artist statements about my own work. It’s torture. How do I put into words the story I am wanting to tell through line and shape and form? How do I find the language to describe the process by which I chose a particular color? A specific texture? How can I describe what the work means to me when I’m not yet certain I know?

It’s not easy.

Visual art transcends the written word. Art is its own language. A language that is difficult to translate.

In the middle of July our Incubator group was tasked with writing personal artist statements for the McGuffey website. For the past few weeks I fought with mine. It finally came together yesterday. I submitted my three hundred and fifty nine words and hoped for the best. I tried to be concise and tried to avoid all the things I dislike about most artist statements. That being said, ‘ash of memory’ was a darling I could not kill. Here’s what I wrote:

Fail better. Samual Beckett’s words of advice are Mimm Patterson’s goal for her year as an Incubator Artist at McGuffey Art Center. Mimm, who moved from California to Crozet in 2022, is a mixed-media artist, writer and trauma-informed yoga therapist. She is also someone who knows failure. 

“In my thirties, before I moved to Ireland, I worked as an artist” she says. In the 1990’s Mimm was the quintessential struggling artist in the San Francisco Bay Area. “I survived but I didn’t thrive. I think I lacked the self-belief required to create from a place of authenticity. I wasn’t brave enough to be vulnerable. But now I possess a grounded sense of purpose and the tenacity that comes with decades of life experience. I won’t feel shattered if I fail. I’ll feel stronger knowing that I tried.”  

Mimm’s work is informed by the belief that truth is malleable. Once we understand that our own truth is unfixed – that it is determined by the perspective from which it is viewed – we are able to reconcile our past with our perception of the present. 

This concept is critical to her current work, an exploration of her family and the dark mark its ash of memory has left on Mimm like an inky fingerprint that can’t be washed away.

“In some ways my new work is a practice of self-study. When my mother and I reunited after twenty years of estrangement I learned my family’s history for the first time. When she passed in 2019 she left behind several thick volumes of photographs and documents dating back to the mid-nineteenth century. I am learning who I am and how I came to be through these images and the stories they tell.”

Over the next year she hopes to share those stories through a body of work that inspires connection and shines with clarity and resonance. 

Mimm holds a BA in Studio Art and Education and a MFA in Transpersonal Psychology. She is an ICF certified coach as well as a SoulCollage® and Guided Autobiography facilitator. Mimm shares her new home in Crozet with her partner Ben and their twenty-year-old cat Bruce.