ARTIST STATEMENT

Cricket Desmarais is a Key West artist whose encaustic paintings & installations capture fragments of beauty’s duality: a skinny but dignified fisherman in with an empty creel & a bottle of Rum, Cuban boys hauling hope with inner tubes— not to swim but to build their chug & chance for a better life? 

She is a prequalified artist for the Art In Public Places program & is currently working on large-scale installation pieces based on personal interviews integrated with scientific data to explore the lure & lore of the Florida Keys seas & the history & culture behind it. Her aim is to bring order & space to the narratives of the human psyche, & she humanizes objects & their environment to promote commentary & call the viewer into question: What are your values? What is your history? What is your part in the greater whole?

An intimacy and comfort found in the island’s macro and micro temper intensity & the particulars of her process often give way to a blend of improvisation and Wabi-sabi, a Japanese world view that centers on three simple realities: nothing lasts, nothing is finished, and nothing is perfect. What is cracked can be good enough.