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Cochran's paintings explore personal longing for physical and spiritual homecoming through the lens of familiar family spaces. Her approach fuses sentimentality with narrative abstraction to reimagine humble domestic moments as still points along two axes—the horizontal (temporal) and the vertical (transcendent).

Cochran works closely with textiles in her process, dyeing her own substrates with foraged flora from the woods around her family’s generational cabin where her paintings are set. The acts of collecting, staining, and working material ground her artistic practice, coloring the image with traces of the physical place itself.

Influenced by the contemplative spirituality of early Renaissance frescoes and altarpieces, everyday objects take on sacramental significance. Vertical and horizontal streaks of color appear to dissolve from partially obscured forms like the warp and weft threads of a textile or traces of architectural elements. Select areas of careful rendering float in and out of tension with passages of rough incompleteness and emphasize chairs, tables, cups, and dishes as ambivalent symbols of connection and absence. The effect is an ambiguous sense of motion and of stillness, an intersection in which human and divine communion seem to meet.

Cochran's understanding of homecoming ties inextricably to her background in the Classics and owes particularly to the etymological connection between the English term “nostalgia” and its Greek roots nóstos (“homecoming”) and álgos (“pain”). Informed by writers such as Roger Scruton, Josef Pieper, Jacques Maritain, Wendell Berry, C.S. Lewis, T.S. Eliot, and Iris Murdoch, Cochran conceives of nostalgia not as sentimentality, but rather as a deep sense of metaphysical homesickness that points forward as much as it looks back—an intuition of a true Home elsewhere.

To learn more about the artist, vist her about page.