Courtney Childress

About

Courtney Childress works with personal yet ordinary materials, bringing objects out of the periphery into focus. She lives and works in New York, NY. She received her MFA from S.U.N.Y. at Purchase College, Purchase, NY (2012) and her BFA from the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, AL (2008).  My mom and aunt went on a road trip with my grandmother from TX to CO in the summer of 1960. They left crayons in the backseat when they stopped for lunch. These melted into puddles in the back of the rental convertible. My mom laughs when she tells the part about throwing chunks of crayon out the window as they drove down the highway. I amassed a great collection of crayons, that I peeled and melted down, layering colors into painted-desert inspired rock crayons. In this case, I used close to 4,000 crayons and it is so large that I have to push it across the floor to ‘draw.’