Ties That Bind: Magic, Messages and Memories features Ellen Brook with Wendy Ackrell, Marie Cameron, Rozanne Hermelyn Di Silvestro, Lisa Kairos, and Larraine Seiden in an exhibition hosted at Art Bias, San Carlos and curated by Karen M. Gutfreund. These six Bay Area women artists explore the various interpretations of connections, relationships, and bonds that link individuals through time and memory. Ties That Bind is a poignant exploration of the human experience, inviting viewers to reflect on their own recollections, the passage of time, and the significance of the moments that shape our lives. The diversity and beauty of these individual artist’s work has created a rich and thought-provoking exhibition that highlights magic of hopes, dreams and human connection. 

Wendy Ackrell looks to connect with her grandmother—to honor the matrilineal DNA and memories that fill her soul. Through her collected talismans and treasures she expresses thoughts and memories by braiding them into three-dimensional objects. Ellen Brook series of works: Messages in a Bottle, express universal themes of isolation, connection, and healing, based off a collection of war letters she found written from her Grandfather to her Grandmother. They also reflect on the themes of belonging and love in one’s ancestral chain, perhaps even as a way to “heal backwards in time.” Marie Cameron creates works that express themes of hope and beauty in the face of loss in exploring how humans relate to their environment and each other. During the pandemic she searched for connections to the feelings of wonder, hope and joy. She also reconnected to our collective past, to the perspective of the long arc of time and remembering the love. Rozanne Hermelyn Di Silvestro is a visual thinker, reflecting life through paint and ink portraying the fleeting moments between the unfamiliar, sharing a common place and time. She seeks to document and to remember these drifting connections. Lisa Kairos explores themes of change and transformation through the subject of landscape. The places that inspire her paintings become a lens through which she strives to make sense of the world and time that we are living in. She is inspired by the intersection of environment, perception, beauty, and technology. Larraine Seidens’s Seamless Series is about transformation of the unseen work that holds things together and comes directly out of the chaos of contemporary life. Her art practice is meditation, searching for moments of transcendence. She accumulates memories and witnessing, to see what is revealed and therefore remembered. to find meaning among the everyday minutia.