Central Kentucky Gothic
Esther E. Randall

Artist Statement:  My art is about my life in Kentucky; not the one that the rest of the world thinks of-when the subject of the commonwealth comes up -  the one of coal mines, basketball and horses.  It is about my lived landscape that has become embedded in my psyche.  

Someday I am going to wreck my car because I am always observing my surroundings.  I am slaked by my environment as I drive, and am continually seeking visual phenomena to ‘feed’ my art.   First there is sky and light; my state has a very big one compared to my childhood home state, and its variability enthralls me. Emphasizing cloud formations allows me to create dramatic and often irrational lighting effects.  The second is ‘place’.  I look for odd, out of the way sites easily overlooked, as a means to explore different levels of visibility, of spaces, of existence.  They become the set for what I think of as magical realism or ‘Central Kentucky Gothic’.  

My goal is to turn the ordinary into the extraordinary; the mundane into the mythic.  I do this through the ‘drama of detail’ as I include elements meant to evoke a narrative.  However, I leave it up to the viewer to provide their own explanations as to what is going on.  I am a story ‘suggester’ rather than a ‘story-teller’ in that regard. My work is about color, light, space, and mystery. 

Artist Bio:  Esther E. Randall is a retired Professor and Gallery Director in the Department of Art and Design at Eastern Kentucky University in Richmond, Kentucky.  Earning her MFA in sculpture from Indiana University in 1978 and her BFA from the University of Georgia in 1972, she is the recipient of an Al Smith Fellowship in 1998 and two Kentucky Foundation For Women Grants in 1992 and 2007.  Although trained as a figurative sculptor, Ms. Randall works with a wide variety of media and approaches, and has been exhibited widely regionally and nationally.  Her most recent work has been involved with drawings of the Kentucky landscape.

Born in Schenectady New York, Ms. Randall moved to Aiken South Carolina when she was three years old.  Currently she lives in Berea, Kentucky with her husband Oliver Keels, and cat Emma.