Nancy Carter has been creating drawings, paintings and handmade paper in Athens, Georgia, for more than 20 years. Trained at Agnes Scott College, Harvard University and the University of Georgia, where she was recipient of a Ford Foundation Grant, she is an educator as well as an artist and has taught at levels from elementary through university. She received a Georgia Council for the Arts Individual Artist grant to explore papermaking with native fibers in 1987. In 1994 she was an Artist-in-Residence with the University of Georgia in Cortona, Italy. She served as an Artist-in-Education for the Georgia Council for the Arts for 10 years and was instrumental in founding the Athens Area Arts Council, serving as its president for two terms.

In describing her work, she says:

Art is for me above all a spiritual exercise. Color and texture, shape and form, light and dark are the vocabulary of a symbolic language in which I explore images from dreams, thoughts and experiences, hoping to touch a level of meaning that underlies everyday experience.

I have been influenced by a lifelong love affair with the natural world, by the psychology of Carl Jung, especially Jung's concept of the feminine principle and by spirituality, particularly that of the Christian tradition. I believe that much of the ancient wisdom regarding the feminine has been excluded from western traditions, and that our neglect and dishonor of the feminine is reflected in our neglect and dishonor of the natural world. It seems to me no accident that awareness of the feminine and awareness of ecology are re-emerging simultaneously in the West; this fills me with hope.

My imagery comes from nature--trees and plants, the textures of the earth's surface, mountains and water, light and shadow--which I see as sacred--the physical expression of the loving divine creative impulse. In my work, as in dreams, these elements of nature take on another, symbolic level of meaning.

©2007 The Studio Group