PNA Gallery Show  

Artists Reception July 10 7:00-10:00 p.m. 2009

Selected works

 .

Kathleen McHugh is a subliminal artist who tells us the old stories,
but telling them blunt, without sentimentality,  searching for the
elusive trigger that galvanizes our deepest emotional responses.

We live in an essential creative collaboration with God, Earth, and
each other, she tells us ––and we neglect our part in that
relationship at considerable peril to the whole shebang.

 In "Poetry of Being," the mermaid,  having landed
herself and called the sailor to shore, looks down not at her feminine
upper body but at her inconveniently scaled and tailed lower half, the
part of her that can't walk on land but can, if she understands she
has the choice––and chooses––swim away,

Consequence attends every action, McHugh tells us. There is a cost to
every wish come true. We know how Anderson ends the story, but McHugh's

mermaid is more Yemanja  than Russalka; she has strength––both grace and power––

makes no bargain with the sea witch,                                                                  
but keeps her tail and returns to her natural home, the sea.

In "Sea Dance"we see her backlit in gold against a marled apricot sky,
dancing in the trough of a wave ––or perhaps on the sea's bottom, the
waters having parted to either side.

In her Mermaids, as in her sensuous Eve Series, McHugh plumbs the
depths of the old tales, peeling back surfaces that appear to be only
page-deep, revealing far more complex  mythologies whose elements
don't show on the surface, though we may feel them stirring with
possibilities we probably haven't even guessed were there.

-Marjorie Rommel, program director
The Northwest Renaissance: Poets, Performers & Publishers, Inc.