Julie Maren cuts paintings apart and puts them back together differently. She fills acorn caps with paint. She carves stone, then asks what happens when stone and canvas and found objects stop being separate things. What she calls “the emergency” — an intense period of creative disruption — wasn’t a crisis so much as a threshold. On the other side of it was an entirely new visual language, and work that hasn’t stopped evolving since. Maren is a Colorado-based biophilic artist whose wall-based installations are among the most recognized in the field. Trained as both a painter and stone carver, she spent years mastering those disciplines before beginning to blur the boundaries between them — cutting into her own canvases, reconfiguring them into dimensional forms, and weaving in natural materials gathered from the landscape that has shaped her practice since childhood. The result is work that creates genuine depth: surfaces you look both at and into, carrying the textures and rhythms of the natural world into interior spaces.Her practice is rooted in the belief that humans possess an innate need to connect with nature — and that art can answer that need in ways that go beyond the decorative. Maren has built a body of work held in significant private and public collections.Work by Julie Maren is available through Illumine Gallery. Please inquire for commissions and shipping.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​