AVA BOCK
Artist Statement
Life, structure, memory, and the spaces between them.
ARTIST STATEMENT
Life exists within structure, but it is not the structure itself.
My work is rooted in a reductive abstract language developed through the relationship between life and the structures that contain it. I use two recurring forms to articulate this relationship: the circle represents life as continuous, adaptive, and cyclical; the square represents structure, the physical, biological, and constructed systems through which life moves.
This language developed from my experience of environments where organic and constructed forms exist in constant proximity. Growing up in New York, plants and people occupied the same visual landscape as brick, glass, steel, and concrete. Later experiences across North Carolina and the Pacific Northwest changed the landscape around me but reinforced my awareness of the ways place, memory, and perception become intertwined.
I work across sculpture, photography, drawing, and painting, using each medium as a different way of examining these relationships. Increasingly, I am interested in what can be removed from an image or object while allowing the experience it holds to remain. Rather than reproducing a place, memory, or event, I reduce it toward atmosphere, material, light, form, and spatial relationships.
Material is particularly important to this process. Bio-resins, cast polymers, inks, recycled polyester, and other translucent or layered materials allow me to work between states: liquid and solid, transparent and opaque, organic and manufactured. Through accumulation, suspension, containment, and repetition, materials become a means of preserving experiences without illustrating them literally.
My photographic practice approaches the same questions through observation. Landscape and organic forms become opportunities to isolate light, color, surface, scale, and atmosphere until recognition becomes secondary to perception. Across both photographic and sculptural work, I am moving toward greater abstraction, not as an abandonment of what came before, but as a continuing process of reduction.
Ultimately, I think of the work as a form of containment. An artwork can hold something that no longer physically exists: a particular light, place, sensation, memory, or moment of understanding. What remains is not a record of the experience, but a physical trace of having lived it.
That pursuit continues to shape the artist I am becoming.
Biography
Ava Garcia-Pomales Bock, professionally known as Ava Bock, is an American abstract artist working across sculpture, photography, drawing, and painting. Her practice examines relationships between life, structure, memory, and place through a reductive visual language shaped by material, light, and form.
Bock's artistic practice began with photography after receiving her first film camera in 1997. Her early work centered on portraiture and the natural environment before gradually moving toward abstraction. She earned an Associate of Fine Arts in Visual Arts from Cape Fear Community College in Wilmington, North Carolina, in 2011. As her interest in physical materials and spatial experience developed, her practice expanded beyond the photographic image to include drawing, painting, relief, and sculpture.
In 2022, Bock earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Sculpture from the University of North Carolina at Asheville, where she focused on industrial materials and three-dimensional practice. This period further established material experimentation as a central part of her work and contributed to her ongoing use of resins, cast polymers, translucent materials, and layered processes.
Having lived and worked across New York, North Carolina, and the Pacific Northwest, Bock has developed a practice continually influenced by changing landscapes and constructed environments. Rather than treating those transitions as separate chapters, she draws from them as an accumulating visual and material vocabulary.
Her work has been presented through exhibitions, public installations, and contemporary art publications in the United States and internationally. She also serves as a curator with Get Inspired Magazine, an international arts publication based in the Netherlands.
Bock currently lives and works in Eugene, Oregon, where her practice continues to move toward greater abstraction across photographic and sculptural forms.