Andrea Fredeen may be the city's first physioartist to hang a show at the Two
Rivers Gallery.
The local painter is also a physiotherapist and oftentimes an artist's workaday profession is irrelevant to their creative process but in her case it is intrinsically connected.
At first, the relationship isn't overtly visible. Fredeen's exhibition is called Story Tellers, but the images - 14 oil paintings on canvas - are not of speaking or writing. They are of various body parts, especially hands.
"I am really interested in stories and the way people tell them," she said. "Look at me right now (involuntarily gesturing with drama), even when I'm not conscious of it, I'm doing it: we can read so much more about a story from people's hands."
The curatorial staff at the Two Rivers
Gallery understood this when they agreed to showcase these works.
"The human body is capable of many ways of expressing emotion, of making a point; much can be read as a story from the look on someone's face or the posture they hold," said the curators in a written statement. "Hands in particular are capable of saying much. Every callus and blister, tendon and joint, marks an individual's own particular story."
There is where her physiotherapy background starts to emerge in the colours and brush strokes. She explained how she arrived at the hands as her central theme.
"In earlier paintings I was obsessed with trees and how they were built," she said. "It may not seem natural, but this, to me, was a natural extension into hands."
The appendages of people are even called limbs, to stress the close relationship between people and trees to the eye of an artist. To the touch of a physiotherapist, the relationship is even stronger. She said damaged limbs are even more informative to the artist within, because she is learning along with the victims of injury and disease how to redefine physical communication, new ways of telling the nonverbal elements of that person's story. They are no less expressive, she said, but they have to express in new ways.
Fredeen is not used to revealing her own stories - those rendered and hung on the wall. This is her first solo exhibition and she admitted she was nervous.
"It has been hard. I would be a great hermit," she said. "You are all alone, doing your painting or writing or whatever your art is, so it was nerve-wracking to see it all displayed for the public to see.
Story Tellers is on display until Nov. 29.
