Mary Wees was born in 1986 in Omaha, Nebraska, in the United States of America. In 2009 she received her Bachelors of Fine Arts and Bachelors of Philosophy at Creighton University where she was awarded Excellence in Painting from the department of fine arts. While living in the United States, Wees had three solo expositions at Bellwether Boutique (Omaha, NE), The Bancroft Street Gallery (Omaha, NE), and The Hallway Gallery (Jamaica Plain, MA). In 2009 she was awarded a residency at Empty Room (Omaha, NE) where Wees created and managed an experimental art project called 25 Days of Building; in which she built a space for 25 invited artists to create collaborative work for 25 days. Wees also took part in an art residency program in Chicago Illinois in 2011 called project 7002. In 2012 she moved to France and has continued to work on her art, having a solo show in the village of Sévérac le Château in 2015. Most recently, in October of 2020, Wees was invited to show as part of La Balade D’Ateliers in Nantes, France.
My goal as an artist is to create work representing the space between the objective sense of the world, and the subjective inner understanding of it. My process from untouched paper to finished piece is crucial to reaching this aim. The reason I create my paintings is to represent the ideas and inner realities that connect us but are not easily put into words.
I begin each series with an abstract ink or watercolor painting. I saturate my mind with images and ideas that attract me at the moment of preparation. From there I go to the abstract markings and search for images in the way the pigment has settled. Once images start to emerge, the piece becomes a conversation between the unintentional marks and my well of mental images and ideas. The series becomes a composite of these extracted images, where certain forms and themes persist.
