Anna Pugh is a visual artist working in the expanded field of painting. Exploring greater questions of material memory and sense of place, Pugh works with the shadows of collected objects, plants, and ephemera to build compositions in dialogue with their silhouettes. Pugh received her MFA in Painting from Boston University in 2026, and her BA in Studio Art from Wake Forest University in 2018 with minors in Art History and Biology.

Exploring greater questions of material memory, sense of place, and encounters with ordinary phenomena, I contend in the studio with the question how can the unnamable be given shape? The work lands somewhere in between: neither representational nor abstract, my paintings render ecologies of scattered forms whose disarray gives way to the emergence of recognition.

The materials I use are intentionally chosen for their interaction with light, their relationship to the namable, or both. I often make my own grounds and paints, incorporating burn pile ash, cellulose, soil, glitter, phosphorescent pigments, graphite, and matte carbon black. Through these materials, the works shift subtly in changing light, inviting a perceptual experience that echoes the shifting nature of being in time.

Working with the shadows of collected objects, plants, and ephemera from the environment around me, I build compositions through tracing, drawing, painting, and layering in dialogue with their projected silhouettes. Shadow becomes both a metaphor and collaborator; its qualities mirror the slippery and contradictory qualities of memory’s distortion and indexicality, its absence and presence, its alterations by way of attempted preservation. This embodiment through shape and texture becomes a way for material and imagery to converge, allowing forms to serve as vessels for memory’s residue. Through this collaboration there is not just recovery but also invention in the voided spaces left by what we no longer remember.