Syringes and blood pressure pumps don’t normally come to mind when you think about fine art.
For Chicago-based artist Pamela Paulsrud, who was a nurse for 10 years before turning to art full-time, the medical field is second nature.
“I think I’ve always been an artist,” she said. “I actually started my undergrad in art and got sidetracked.”
Paulsrud works mostly with books and paper to create her art. Her work is currently on display in Evanston as part of the “Rock Paper Scissors” exhibition at the Noyes Cultural Arts Center.
Paulsrud’s two pieces in the show, “When You See the Soil” and “Touchstones,” reflect an environmental theme that can be found in much of her work.
“She’s able to bring in life experience, research and response to the environment,” said Melissa Craig, an art professor at Columbia College who taught Paulsrud as a graduate student.
“When You See the Soil” is an installation that uses rocks to tell a poem in Braille. The artist and her brother, a poet and conservationist, collaborated on the work to make an ecological statement.
“The poem relates that we’re not doing the best job we could be doing (for the environment),” she said. “Although things may look beautiful in certain places, it may be because of the chemicals that are placed on the land.”
The piece’s name is also the title of the poem, which was written by her brother. Two of the poem’s lines inspired the installation: “Until the vision is felt inside / The eyes, the brain, the hands can’t see.”
Some viewers interpreted the environmental piece differently.
“I felt if you were blind and touching it, it would be like going on the beach at night and feeling out the rocks,” said Loni Diep, a visitor at the Noyes Cultural Arts Center. “It made me think about how things will read differently if you can’t see it.”
Paulsrud, who calls her style “conceptual,” understands that not everyone will see the vision she has for her different works.
“I recognize that nobody sees anything the same,” she said. “It’s my hope that not only will they perhaps see my view, but that they’ll also find something in themselves that relates to it or that they can be inspired by.”
“Touchstones” is a piece made of books that Paulsrud fashioned to look like rocks.
The installation started with inspiration from nature. Paulsrud said she then had dreams about stones and realized “how stones are a lot like books, in that they have history.”
Paulsrud said she often develops ideas this way.
“She has a very meditative part to her process,” Craig said. “The book rocks came about just from daily walks on the lake.”
Now Paulsrud is working on combining art and her background in medicine through cymatics, or sound wave phenomena.
“It seems unusual. Nursing and art don’t seem so cohesive,” Paulsrud said. “Now I see they’re coming together.”
Cymatics pieces are created by shooting different frequencies through sand on paper.
“It’s made me have a better understanding of how our energies are affected,” she said.
