Artist Profile Allie Sutherland

Sutherland’s gauze-soft textures orchestrate a passage between worlds.

Artist Statement

In a field of abstraction, a Corinthian column comes into focus, symbolizing feminine youth. A chaotic symphony of mirrored elements and divisions encircle it. To the left is an abstraction of a live rose meeting a dead one, divided by a line, depicting superficial notions of the difference between the dead and the living. Along the bottom, a haze of floral forms breaks at a particular point along a line, referencing the mythological event during which Persephone is sucked into the underworld while picking flowers. This piece represents Persephone’s unique role as an agent of both the living and the dead. It acknowledges the intensity of her supposed abduction and addresses and begins to challenge the black-and-white thinking surrounding the underworld.

Artist Biography

Allie Sutherland is a New York based artist and former architect whose work explores the fluid intersections of memory and dream, and the human and the spiritual. Through vivid colors and tactile textures, she navigates the threshold between abstraction and representation, capturing universal emotions and timeless narratives that hover at the edge of consciousness.

Her intuitive process begins with an act of surrender—creating compositions with her non-dominant hand, allowing subconscious forms to emerge organically. She then refines these initial gestures with oil paint, zooming in and out of details, treating each section as its own painting. Sculptural impasto brushwork blurs the boundary between two and three dimensions, creating a dynamic interplay of surface and depth.

Sutherland’s background in classical architecture informs the symbolic and structural elements that occasionally surface in her compositions, grounding ephemeral emotions in familiar forms. This tension between abstraction and figuration mirrors how emotion shapes and distorts memory, keeping it vibrant yet elusive. Each painting becomes an invitation for introspection, offering viewers a portal into the universality of human experience.