Fragments into Wholeness: Creative, Pamella Allen

Pamella Allen
1 day ago
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Bamboo, Papaya & The Golden Dragon 36”x24” Acrylic, nylon, paper & mixed media on canvas ©️Pamella Allen 2026

Pamella Allen 2026. The mystic of the natural world that has me in a constant state of awe. Pamella Allen’s mixed-media works seek to create spaces for activation and connection, informed by memory, observation, culture, and ritual. In kinship with the natural world and the cyclical rhythm of life, death, and renewal. Each piece becomes both vessel and meditation, inviting audiences into a continuum of healing, transformation, and dialogue between the personal and the universal.

Multidisciplinary Art Statement

Pamella Allen’s practice is a layered meditation on memory, spirit, and the mystic of the natural world. Across portraits, handmade paper, earthworks, collage, prose, and printmaking, her work honors cycles of continuance and transformation.

In portraits, she limits herself to two or three colors, preserving the meditative flow of the first lines. These figures—solitary, gazing, or lowered—become liquid stories of how we hold space in natural and spiritual landscapes. Collage extends this dialogue, assembling fragments of watercolors, pastels, graphite, photographs, acrylics, handmade papers, and prints created years apart, forming archetypal totems of persistence and interconnectedness.

Her papermaking practice, deepened in Jamaica, draws on kozo, abaca, hemp, and bamboo fibers, soaked in rainwater and pounded with Lignum Vitae upon stone. Through molding, casting, embossing, and spraying, she transforms pulp into sculptural shells and luminous abaca installations—landscapes of memory and living form. Earthworks root spirit in terrain, mandalas embody cycles of return, and prose poetry flows through these works as fractured yet luminous text.

19”x19”

Acrylic, pen & ink

and Mixed Media on Ply Wood

©️Pamella Allen 2025

Solar and botanical printmaking extend her ecological dialogue, imprinting light and plant forms directly onto paper as ephemeral records of place and time. These prints, alongside handmade books begun at sea in the 1990s, archive thought and process as alpha and omega of her creative self.

Together, these practices form a continuum of meditation and actualization, holding space for the eternal dialogue between the personal and the universal.

To create this series of mixed-media paintings, I have appropriated the ritual, therapeutic, and storytelling uses of the mandala in cultures throughout history, from Africa to Asia and the Americas. To make My Mandalas, I use my own artifacts and archetypal images, the motion of repetitive form, the written word, and earth elements such as sand and soil to create a landscape grounded in the mystic of nature. The desire is to make a place of "one-ness" in the process of creating these works that translates to the viewer as a place of inspired peace, a place of meditation

Left to Right: Are You Ruby’s Granddaughter? Are You Ruby's Granddaughter II, Are You Ruby's Granddaughter III

19”x16”x4” Acrylic, Fan Coral, and Mixed Media on Ply Wood

©️ © Pamela Allen 2025, 2026

Xaymaca: From Mountains to Sea / Finding Mother in the Motherland Mixed Media Earthworks & Portraits on Canvas

This new series of mixed media earthworks in relief marks my creative return “home” to Jamaica, once called Xaymaca by the Arawak. In seeking traces of my late mother, who passed in my infancy, I walk where she walked—embodying connection to maternal lineage through the island’s naturescapes and people. These abstract expressionist works investigate place, memory, and ancestral knowledge lost and found in the language of nature, object, and symbol.

Are You Ruby’s Granddaughter? 19”x16”x4”Acrylic, Fan Coral, and Mixed Media on Ply Wood ©️Pamella Allen2025

Wall Text

Pamella Allen’s multidisciplinary practice is a meditation on memory, spirit, and kinship with the natural world. Her handmade paper—crafted from kozo, abaca, hemp, and bamboo fibers through rainwater soaking and pounding with Lignum Vitae—becomes a vessel and dialogue with cycles of life, death, and renewal. Cast, molded, embossed, and sprayed, the paper transforms into sculptural shells and luminous installations. Earthworks root spirit in terrain, mandalas embody cycles of return, and prose poetry flows as fractured yet luminous text. Solar and botanical printmaking extend this ecological dialogue, imprinting light and plant forms directly onto paper as ephemeral records of place and time. Together, these works form a continuum of meditation and transformation.