Visual artist Terri Rolland creates work steeped in the tradition of abstraction and modernist landscapes. She considers her “East Coast working-class roots and her feminist/butch/queer sensibility” to be a major factor in her aesthetic and aims for off-kilter but precise resonance in her work. Working with clay paint on panel or canvas to create a matte luminosity of surface and color that is both active and still. In her work she asks, “how do we sense the sublime and essential power of nature that is set apart from a culture of clamor and distraction?”
Rolland has had residencies at Ucross Foundation and Jentel, was a 2021-2022 fellow at the Roswell Artist-in-Residence Program, and has exhibited extensively. She has also been awarded grants from the Pollock Krasner Foundation, the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation, and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. She has lived and worked in New Mexico since 1990.
During her first MacDowell residency in 2004, Rolland worked on paintings and other works on paper for a solo exhibition at the Linda Durham Gallery in New York. The work focused on issues of human destruction of the natural world.
During her 2022 residency, Rolland completed eight paintings on panel and dozens of works on paper. The new work explores weather and environmental conditions vastly different from the desert southwest which has informed her work for three decades. "The woods, insects, dappled light and humidity of New Hampshire have contributed new ideas and a new vocabulary of color and mark-making" to her land/sky based abstract paintings.
