Andrea Higgins: Self-Portraits

Andrea Higgins is known for her intricate paintings of fabric swatches that draw on the expressive power of textiles to create evocative, abstract portraits. Inspired by childhood trips to Britex Fabrics with her grandmother, and a fellowship in Indonesia where she observed the labor-intensive process of weaving extravagant sarongs, Higgins "weaves" textile patterns with paint.

Her newest works are diptychs, in which one panel - the "woven" looking one - refers to the way skin pulls after it's been cut and stitched back together. Higgins, a cancer survivor, is referring to her own body and the series of surgeries that have left her with physical and emotional scars. The other panels refer to one of her favorite blouses. During her illness and recovery, she found she frequently wore floral patterns, and attributes her attraction to them to both the omnipresence of flowers that people brought her when she was ill, and that these "cheery" clothes that made her feel ok about herself when she re-entered the world feeling scarred and vulnerable. Of course every floral painting is also a memento mori.

This series of paintings is the most personal the artist has ever made. It, like all of her work, is about the image one presents to the world... In this case, both a direct reference to her body and her mortality and to the way we all deal with our scars and move forward to live our lives.