Sondra Dorn

Sondra Dorn, mixed-media artist, lives and works in Weaverville, North Carolina.  She has been a working artist since her days as a Penland CORE fellow in 1992.

After completing her BFA and MFA, Sondra completed Artist in Residencies at Penland School and Arrowmont School.

Sondra blends her passion for close observation of the landscape and small fragments of natural objects with photography, computer graphics, drawing, painting and collage. Her evolution into her current work, Mixed Media paintings on panel, evolves from her roots in textile art where she grew to love material and process and careful attention to detail.

Her work is shown in multiple galleries and has received multiple commissions, grants and awards. 

Artist Statement

I always search the world for pattern, color and composition. Different perspectives – the view from airplane or through a microscope –reveal abstract patterns that are the basis for my visual vocabulary. Technology (airplanes, microscopes, computer-aided design) enables these different views, allowing me to apprehend hidden details, and to shift back and forth between different aspects, the micro and the macro.

The materials that I use to create brings my work back to a human personal scale. Through many marks and layers; I build my landscapes by hand using processes that are slow and intimate. I engage with the forms I’ve discovered in the world around me, dissolving and reconstituting them with papers, fabric, thread, paints, pencils and acrylic mediums. I experience these re-imagined landscapes as close-up details and distant topographies simultaneously. I hope that my work invites you to take the time to enjoy these shifting spaces and perspectives.

I like to think of my pieces as small windows; selected observations of the beautiful world we live in.