Mar 42 min read

Outside In | Addi Lemmon

Showing from March 4 to March 18, 2024

In the past four years, Addi Lemmon has been exploring the concept of “childhood romanticism”: a term she invented to explain to professors the way she represents childhood memories of play, as they have been glossed over by idealistic nostalgia and misremembering. Since watercolour renderings and scrapbooking collage has been with her since birth, Addi uses these mediums specifically as a means to re-enter the headspace of the creations she made as a child to make her adult work as playful and stress-free as possible. With the recent reconnection to her childhood via the teaching of art to children, her current practice now includes an exploration into mixed media collage depictions of symbols from old family photos, combined with the three-dimensional application of locally foraged materials like mushrooms, mosses, and plant matter. Outside In is a conversation between these childhood memories of play, both figurative and abstracted, to examine how colours, textures, objects, words, and environments are fragmented and misremembered over time to create the narratives that become our identities.

About the Artist

Addi Lemmon is a freelance painter and illustrator currently living and working in Guelph, Ontario. She graduated from the University of Guelph in 2022, where she received a Bachelor of Arts Honours degree in Studio Art with a minor in Art History. Lemmon’s style is primarily inspired by her love of plants and the outdoors, as well as her experience of growing up in rural southern Ontario. Her work spans multiple mediums such as watercolour and acrylic painting, collage, and printmaking, embracing natural and organic subject matter, and is generally associated with mindfulness and her practice of forest-bathing. Lemmon has exhibited work in group shows at Zavitz Gallery, Boarding House Gallery, and Necessary Arts Collective, and since 2022 has displayed and sold her work at many community-run craft markets.

Available Work