Aldrich is a painter based in Knoxville, TN, whose textured, material-driven works explore the meeting point of modernist painting, the body, and lived experience.
My work is about the places where the concerns of modernist painting meet my own experiences and the physical reality of the body.
Aldrich’s work is deeply material and process-driven, often using industrial sealants and unconventional mediums to achieve textures that echo the physicality of oil paint while resisting complete control. She approaches her materials with a kind of mimetic literalism—creating surfaces that embody their subjects while still engaging in pictorial conventions. This tension between vision and the unruly nature of her materials reflects her interest in transformation, mystery, and the power objects hold, influenced in part by her Catholic upbringing.
Her paintings explore the meeting point between modernist concerns and the lived experience of the body. Paint is combed, piped, squished, sprayed, or transferred, evoking both the pleasure and discomfort of physical presence. The grid often appears as a structure—both support and resistance—through which materials press, suggesting themes of conformity, control, and the push and pull between freedom and restraint. Her work embraces contradiction: it can be humorous, beautiful, unsettling, and visceral all at once.
