Dana DeGiulio, Resident Artist Lecture 2024

Dana DeGiulio gives a lecture at Skowhegan talking about her interdisciplinary practice as an artist which spans writing, collage, assemblage, painting, performance, and drawing. DeGiulio talks about how her practice is interested in making connections to the real. DeGiulio explores this by having the need to have a structure for her work where she can pour her agitation and grief into and then use that as a building block to construct her practice. This allows DeGiulio to have her practice hold her in a way that provides stability. DeGiulio then speaks about the need to build a genre driven practice. For DeGiulio, being a perceptual painter allows her to look at the environment that she was built in, and built around that environment in order to let the paintings be what she needs them to be. DeGiulio speaks about the material ecology of a studio and work space, and how having something to hold her together allows her to turn her body into a legible gesture, which helps her find the female form; a female form that can be mobilized into a sign, and how that can be a container to explore her painting practice. For DeGiulio, painting is how she takes care of herself in order to be able to attend to things: to feel her guts, breathe, and engage with the reptilian parts of her brain. All of this helps DeGiulio be in the world.