Val Britton

Val Britton was born in Livingston, NJ but is now a San Francisco resident. She has exhibitions all over the States; New York, Wyoming and San Francisco to only name a few. Britton makes immersive-collaged drawings, drawn on the language of maps, and is her way of putting together the pieces of her past. This body of extraordinary work is a reflection of longing to connect to her father who used to be a truck-driver, who travelled all around the States transporting industrial machinery. By creating the routes that her father often drove, she is dealing with the lost parts of her childhood. Britton makes collages by using pieces of paper put together in a spectacular way. She draws on it, makes detailed symbols and stains it all with salty washes of ink. Her creativity and sense of fine details are all clearly visible in her pieces of stunning art. She does not know how her work is going to help her stitch her past together, but says that it “compels me to put myself in an explorative mode, employing the abstract space of the map to create a pliable structure for intuition, improvisation and chance”. By making her art she has become her own therapist, navigating the blurriness from her past by putting it together in her own creative way. Putting all the small pieces of paper together and making into something bigger is Britton’s way creating “closeness and depth of value”. The maps symbolize the unknown, a search for and a record of where we have been in the past.

Britton is one out of many artists that has been part of The Artist In Residence Program at Recology San Francisco. The program encourages local artists to learn more about recycling as well as provide them with materials and a workspace. All of this is provided at the Solid Waste Transfer and Recycling Center.

More information about the Artist In Residence Program is coming shortly!


/Blair & Melinda

Some of Val Britton's amazing pieces

Work Cited:

Britton, Val. "Val Britton." Val Britton. Flickr, 2010. Web. 9 Dec 2010. <http://www.valbritton.com/>.