In Lori Groff’s art making, thought becomes sensual form. Her painting style is to construct composite layers with elements of drawing and collage, bringing or repeating different ideas or forms into relationship, and incorporating a shifting substructure of philosophy, literature, and poetry. Her art is a process of finding ‘moments of burst’ where the forces of materiality, the gesture, and singularity of each mark interact to prompt new ways of how to sense and relate. Predominantly she works on paper, sometimes on wood or canvas, using various media such as solid paint markers, mop paint, watercolor, ink, duo paint, graphite, and carbon. In her compositions, color and line suggest circumscription without holding things in. To create movement, affect, and attention to states of change are what drive her work. In her poetry, she concentrates on the distillation of language. Her abstractions, figural images, poems, and writing take on simultaneous and multiple readings.
She received a BFA in painting from Metropolitan State University of Denver, and a BA in creative writing from University of Colorado, Denver. She lives and works in Denver.
Her art relates to contemporary issues surrounding intimacy and anonymity, indefinite and definite forms, visuality, senses of self, space, and place. Parallel and crisscrossing her artistic practice is an intense mixture of creative, critical thinking, and methodology of analysis. This was instilled in her through her initial studies and career in the fields of communication disorders and neurophysiology, as well as her personal experience with genetic mutation, and a family history of cancer.
She is inspired by diverse artists and writers, such as Abraham Cruzvillegas, Nancy Spero, Bhanu Kapil, Nick Mauss, Adam Pendleton, Christopher Wool, Tomaž Šalamun, Safaa Fathy, Jennifer Packer, and Nathan Oliveira.
A thread across her work and life is the desire for interactions, associations, and connections that allow for transformation.
If she could become a word, she would become a heteronym. If she could become an image, she would become dusk.
Objects that are emblematic of her practice include:
her library card, her old orange espresso cup, her passport, her newest eye glasses, her blue Jack Kerouac t-shirt, her bicycle, her running shoes, her graphite crayons, her 3”x5” unruled index cards, her grey notebooks, her studio floor, and Louise Bourgeois hands.
