My name is Andrea and my favorite colors are red, blue and yellow.
I make fantasies, mysteries and mischief in whatever media suits my purposes.
When I was a little girl, I loved telling stories, drawing planets and looking at medieval paintings, especially Pieter Bruegel the Elder's work. I like to think my present day pursuits pay homage to these early fascinations.
In 2011 I started cutting images I liked out of magazines and piecing them together to make intricate surreal landscapes. I pushed myself to make everything in the composition appear like something other than what it was.
My 3D work began in 2015 with New Hire, an installation made up of thousands of found primary-colored objects, which I taped, stuffed and hung inside the cubicle I inhabited during a brief stint at an insurance company.
In 2021 I started making narrative net art in the form of websites for fake dystopian businesses.
Sometimes my work is arresting, intrusive or obnoxious, but I always construct it to reward the curiosity of those willing to take the risk of looking closer.
Interview with Den McDervitt of Vespoid Magazine 12-12-24
Of Jim Henson's muppets, who is your favorite and why?
Animal. I like that he represents impulse and raw, unadulterated creativity.
I actually portrayed Animal one year for Halloween. I dyed my hair red and I got a shredded brown vest and drumsticks. I think Animal is the quintessential maniac, the eternal child. He's forever in a state of play.
What movement, past, present, or non even existent, do you most identify with?
Dada. Art based on chance. Dada artists would, for example, open a dictionary to a random page and point their finger impulsively, and then write a poem about the word that their finger landed on.
Found object art is very Dada because you're using things that you stumble upon to create work. So you don't have an intention initially; you allow chance to influence your intentions.
I work with magazines, so I can't have a preconceived notion of what I want to create. I just hope to encounter interesting things in the wild of the magazines and then I synchronize them. It causes me to juxtapose things that I would never think to put together otherwise.
What's the biggest obstacle to creating meaningful art for you?
The pressure to make something beautiful.
And how does that manifest?
Well, my work is never beautiful at the beginning. It's usually very ugly, actually. And I get frustrated by that. I want it to be magical because I want to become obsessed with it. Because I need to be obsessed with it in order to finish it. And I don't become obsessed with it until it gets magical. And so I have to climb past that initial outrage that I have brought something so ugly into existence to get to the place where I see the magic, which makes me understand the piece, which makes me able to enhance that understanding, which causes me to make something meaningful.
Does making great art make you happy, or does being happy help you make great art?
I think it's cyclical. Both of those feed into each other.
My happiness has helped me create the best work of my life, because I'm healthy to the point where I can do something really challenging.
Gluing The Imperfection of Evolution was one of the hardest things I've ever done. I had to be incredibly strategic and patient about it, and those are not really things that come naturally to me. I prefer to improvise. I'm very Animal-esque in that sense. I had to come up with a specific strategy for gluing it down or otherwise I would have completely ruined the composition.
When my works are complete, when they become something beautiful and satisfying, it's just bonus happiness that I experience, which fuels my ability to make more.
The Imperfection of Evolution by Andrea O. Bullard