Emily Pettigrew: Genii Loci — Emily Pettigrew

When Emily Pettigrew is out in the world, unencumbered by the weight of its immensity, she often encounters spaces and sites that fill her with an inexplicable and electric sense of excitement. The sensation is immediate and pleasantly overwhelming, often resonating as otherworldly for the artist. In ancient Romano-British religion, there was a belief in genii loci, meaning the ‘spirits of place.’ This idiosyncratic concept guides Pettigrew’s artistic pursuits, and through her paintings, Pettigrew shares these experiences and recalls the forgotten skill of giving life to a location.

Pettigrew routinely searches out these special settings where the veil feels thin and time is somehow askew. One recent pilgrimage led to the Olsen House in Cushing, Maine, made famous by Andrew Wyeth’s painting, Christina’s World. In this well-known work, Christina lies cinematically across an expansive grassy field, staring longingly towards a house in the distance. What Pettigrew did not know as a child when she fell in love with this image was that Christina was disabled and unable to walk. Forgoing a wheelchair, she instead crawled everywhere she went. Pettigrew’s own development of physical disabilities created a kinship in her mind with both the person and the house.

A curious question comes into focus– As generations of people inhabit and traverse the planet, do they add magic to where they have been? And if the time we spend in a place adds spirit to the site, how do we acknowledge our place in it alongside others? For Pettigrew, the answer is always found in painting. The dog she meticulously renders kicking up fall leaves along a path is now forever etched into the scene, just as she is now part of the Olsen House’s storied history and presence in a tender self-portrait, gently extending an open hand to a wandering horse on the property.

Emily Pettigrew (b. 1991, York, Maine) lives and works out of an 18th-century house in the Catskill Mountains of New York. She graduated with a BFA from Pratt Institute and has exhibited both internationally and domestically, including solo shows at The Journal Gallery (NY, NY), Halsey McKay Gallery (East Hampton, NY), and The Fenimore Museum (Cooperstown, NY). Pettigrew’s work is part of the permanent collection of the Hall Art Foundation in Vermont and has been exhibited at the Kunstmuseum Schloss Derneburg (Holle, DE).