Dyslexia turned super power: Aspen artist exhibits at Venice Biennale

When Aspen-based artist Joslyn Doerge’s mom realized her young daughter suffered from dyslexia, she encouraged her to express herself through art.

“I was super lucky because I’m dyslexic, and that wasn’t something people talked about in the ’80s. But my mom, also an artist, was able to spot that in me, which allowed her to help me figure out how to turn it into more of a superpower,” Doerge recalled. “What wound up happening was I found that reading and writing didn’t come naturally to me, but I was able to express myself well through images, which led me to become an artist because, in art, images speak louder than words.”

It was a discovery that shaped the course of her life. While studying at The Art Institute in Chicago, she developed a love for scientific illustration because she was interested in taking things apart to understand how they work.

Through necessity, she eventually discovered pyrography. Early in her career, she found that galleries struggled with carrying and selling her work on paper because of the scale, which was very large and expensive to frame. She realized that if she put her illustrations on larger wood panels, that would solve the framing issue and address the longevity concern that people had about the work being on paper.

“Pyrography is Latin for ‘Writing with fire.’ You are taking a burning tool and using it on wood or leather, or what have you, to create an illustration,” she explained. “So it’s almost like an etching in the sense that first, you have to create the drawing, then you have to create the template and transfer that template before using the fire tool. Some people can do it freehand, but it’s basically fire drawing.”

After several years of living and working in Telluride, Doerge made her way to Aspen 10 years ago.

“I had gone as far as I could go and Telluride with the art world there, and I kind of wanted to broaden my horizons,” she said. “In Aspen, my audience was a little bit more refined.”

During that time, she connected with Peter Hopkins, the founder of SHIM Art Network, an art exhibition service network that provides resources to artists, curators, galleries, and nonprofit organizations through their Exhibitor Groups. She was invited to Art Basel where she and Hopkins had conversations about neurodivergence and art.

“He became very interested in this whole neurodivergence and art as a way of self-expression,” she said. “Artists with neurodivergence operate a little differently which can make it a little harder for us to follow through on certain things. We’ve been exploring how neurodivergent people think, and how that changes how we operate, and playing with that through the artwork being created this year.”

This summer Doerge became the first artist whom the SHIM Art Network sent to The Academy of Fine Arts Kolbermoor in Germany to participate in an Artist in Residence program. She participated in the program from Aug. 4 to 15 this summer to work on a series of pieces that will be on exhibition at the Venice Biennale from Sept. 3 to Nov. 3.

The pieces going to Venice explore the themes of her “inside-out brain.”

“The work that I did there was playing with fractals in the human body,” she said.

She calls the pieces a “Botanical Organ Series” that consists of a “Fern Brain,” “Bleeding Heart,” and “Artichoke Uterus.”

“On these pieces, after I did the wood burning part, I took layered acrylic medium mixed with a crushed iridescent mineral, and I layer them so that as the light changes, the color of the artwork changes,” she said. “It also reflects the passage of time. The concept is the pieces are always ever-changing, as we are always ever-changing. I’m excited to see what people think.”

Sarah Girgis is the Publisher for The Aspen Times. She can be reached at 970-429-9151 or sgirgis@aspentimes.com.