Inka Essenhigh (born 1969) lives and works in New York City, with a second studio nestled in the woods of Maine. She paints solely from her imagination, expressing a child-like wonder for the world and its infinite forms of life.
The boundaries between the real and the imagined dissolve, vegetal phenomena slip into the guise of human dramas, and we can sense the magical entanglement of all realms of experience, of which our human storyline is only a fraction.
Everything is alive and feels and the actual fable is our deadened perception that sees objects where there are beings. Look closely, and you will see a silent scream in the gesture of a branch, a dance of joy in a blossom. This animistic celebration of a living world is what burst forth through Essenhigh’s large-scale tableaus.
Find more on her Instagram or website.
I think about the archetypes and stories that we tell ourselves, and reenact in some way. We change our consciousness through storytelling all the time. If you want to change how people are thinking about something, you can tell a story about it. It does the job really fast. I don’t think I’m necessarily changing consciousness, but I’m painting another place. I would like my paintings to have that feeling — that other worlds are possible.Inka Essenhigh
The selected works below cover a creative period of over twenty years.
