by Sarah Sargent
Art Historian and Curator

In her mysterious and haunting Mammoth Series Atkinson explores the great woolly mammoth’s emergence from the melting ice. There is something ineffably poignant about these paintings that speak to a lost world and an extinct noble beast (not to mention the foreboding inherent in what the warming temperatures mean to our own fate), and we can’t help but feel that frisson of memento mori when we regard them, as if the mammoth is calling out to us:

As you are now so once was I
As I am now so you will be

These are works that inspire visceral responses rather than cognitive comprehension. As an artist Atkinson owes a debt to Surrealism. Her shimmering, many-layered paintings combine a strong abstract element against which float recognizable images. This combination of abstraction and representation exemplifies a dreamlike state and recalls, in particular the work of Chilean Surrealist Roberto Matta.