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Artist Profile: Julie Nocent-Vigil

Julie Nocent-Vigil

5 Luna Drive
Santa Fe, NM 87508

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Bio:

Julie Nocent-Vigil resides in Santa Fe, where she is developing projects in the printmaking and book arts department at the Santa Fe Community College and its Center for the Book. She did graduate studies in Native art history and architecture at the University of New Mexico, and completed an undergraduate degree at the University of Toronto in philosophy and religious studies. Her work incorporates fragments of text, erasure, and built layers to communicate an experience of memory and meaningful connections over time in the records of passage and personal geographies traced in the Southwest. After a residency with the National Park Service at the Tallgrass National Preserve in the Flint Hills of Kansas and study with fiber artist, Jiyoung Chung, she continues to develop a project around her experience of the plains landscape in the Flint Hills - its spaciousness, soft horizons, the echo of center and sensed arcs. Her recent work explores place perceived both as exterior and interior fields, and records the experience of returning, tracing over paths traveled and rutted into prairie earth, the perception of direction, and remembrance through repetition in stitch and print and through kneading and binding of hanji using the process of joomchi. Both the art process recalls and the artifact maps such experience as memory and impression. The artist's work is informed by narratives of prairie travelers returning and tracing paths and the quest for direction amidst the rising and falling arcs of horizon: of women lost on the prairie, of traveler coincident with center navigating when direction appears elusive. Arcs perceptibly rise and fall in the landscape and in one’s path, unfolding, subtle, fluid, and giving way to a deep sense of center, palpable, ever present.