Anne Kirsten Fjeld is a Pacific Northwest encaustic intermedia artist based on Hood Canal in Union, Washington. Her layered works live where memory, grief, instinct, and hope meet. Working with wax, fire, photographs, sketches, text, and found materials, she invites viewers to stand inside the emotion and stay with what has been broken open. Her practice holds to the belief that broken things still carry beauty, meaning, and possibility, and gives light a place to survive. As a young writer, Fjeld was selected to attend the South Carolina Governor’s School for the Arts creative writing program, where she studied with nationally recognized authors and developed a lasting relationship with storytelling and imagery. She later earned a BA in Communications from the College of Charleston, where she worked on the college newspaper and took a photography class that ignited a lasting passion for the medium. That devotion to language and image still moves through her visual practice. Fragments surface, disappear, and return beneath translucent layers of wax, allowing grief and hope, vulnerability and strength, damage and beauty to exist together without being forced toward resolution. Fjeld is an active member of International Encaustic Artists, Encaustic Art Institute, and a participant in the Enso Circle Residency. Fjeld is also a recipient of the Melissa M. Lackman International Encaustic Artists Mentoring Grant. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally and is held in private collections in the United States and abroad. Every Breath A Prayer is to be part of the permanent collection of the Museum of Encaustic Art.
About
BROKEN OPEN
Standing Inside the Emotion
I make work for people who believe that broken things still carry beauty, meaning, and possibility. I make work that doesn’t explain emotion. It lets you stand inside it. Like a remembered dream. I rescue stories carried by wax. Fire. Ash. Paper. Light. I call them liminal psychological portrait-spheres. They begin with photographs, fragments, weathered pages, forgotten marks, or landscapes that seem ordinary until memory transforms them into something else. I am less interested in what happened than in what it continues to feel like. Living on Hood Canal has changed the way I see. Here, the shoreline is rewritten twice each day. Fog softens certainty. Light disappears, only to return from somewhere unexpected. Nothing stays exactly as it was, and yet nothing is entirely lost. Perhaps that is why I work in translucent layers. Encaustic allows memory to behave the way memory actually does. It obscures while revealing. It buries while preserving. Every layer changes the ones beneath it without erasing them. There is a quiet emotional landscape I return to again and again. It is the feeling that arrives inside beautiful moments when we suddenly recognize their impermanence. The awareness that this conversation, this tide, this child, this light, this season will never exist in quite the same way again. I don’t see that feeling as sadness. I see it as love becoming luminous. The ache is not separate from the beauty. It is created by the beauty. That is the place where my work begins. I am not interested in decorating a surface with light. I am interested in giving light a place to live. So it rises slowly through wax… through history… through every layer that came before. Not asking us to hold on tighter. Simply asking us to notice. Because perhaps the most precious things in our lives are precious precisely because they cannot stay. I make work for those who have discovered that love and impermanence are not opposites. That the quiet ache inside beautiful moments is not evidence that something is ending, but evidence that something mattered enough to illuminate us. My work is simply an invitation to stand there a little longer… where memory, light, and longing meet.