Roxanne Peckham
Roxanne Peckham
Roxanne Peckham
Roxanne Peckham
Roxanne Peckham
Roxanne Peckham

Roxanne Peckham

Roxanne Peckham

Roxanne Peckham shifted away from canvas and paper, paint and paintbrushes in her graduating year to work with furniture and a wood-burning tool. The result was an intimate, mixed media work for her 2017 thesis project in the Drawing & Painting program at OCAD U.  

Roxanne Peckham

Roxanne Peckham

Peckham, who admits she possesses a “healthy obsession with detail,” drew upon her experiences in creative writing elective courses at OCAD U to write an intimate personal text that she then painstakingly burned into antique wood dining furniture. She describes the exacting work with the wood-burning tool as a “poetic performance in absolute solitude.” 

Roxanne Peckham

Roxanne Peckham

The work, which won the Robbie Family and Friends Award, explores the damaging effects of verbal and mental relationship abuse and its permanent scars from the perspective of a life lived and learned from. She chose a dining room setting because it’s a space reserved for rituals of celebration with family and friends, but also holds what she describes as “all manner of meticulous behaviour both inflicted and practiced through control, both of self and of others.” The piece is a narrative of the burden of, and liberation from, abuse.  

Roxanne Peckham

Roxanne Peckham

Peckham’s work is concerned with the human condition: “I seek to reveal truth in all manner of experience through themes that connect us on the most basic levels of intimacy,” she says. “When I’m making art, I’m doing so with an open heart, from a place of honesty and vulnerability in an effort to be in constant contact with that which is authentic.” 

Roxanne Peckham

Roxanne Peckham

Although Peckham excelled in visual arts in high school in the late 70s and was accepted at what was then called OCA to continue her studies, a family tragedy kept her from realizing her dream of pursuing her BFA until recently. Her experience in the Drawing & Painting program proved positive — she says she found a community of like-minded people to work alongside.  

Peckham also began exhibiting her work: in 2016 at Catalyst and The Tiny Art Show; last year at Unbounded and the En Plein Air Art Show; and this year with Women’s Kit Regeneration at OCAD U, and Come up to MY Room at the Gladstone Hotel (for which she won the Juror’s Choice Award). After graduation she plans to continue to her art practice from an open concept warehouse studio space in Mississauga, which will provide her with the space and freedom to explore new mixed media projects. She also plans to further her studies in a master’s program.  

Find out more: roxannepeckham.format.com 

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