Statement & Bio

I paint ghosts.
My work emerges from the tension between memory and loss, presence and
absence. Six years ago, my mother asked me the same question ten times in ten minutes. Now
she asks what day it is so often I stop counting. Two years ago, while cleaning a closet in her
house, I discovered a folder of letters she had written to her father as a young woman on the
cusp of marriage and motherhood. At the same time that I am losing her, I am uncovering
pieces of her I never knew. In that same folder, I found weekly letters from my father, written while he was deployed with the U.S. Navy. He died when I was fifteen, after a long illness. Until I found those letters, I only knew fragments of him. Suddenly, his humor, his wit, his small drawings unfolded before me. A father I had lost early returned in his own way.

My paintings are haunted by both the concrete and the elusive. I think about weather,
atmosphere, and light — and how fleeting they are. I try to grasp at something solid, but what
emerges are images that resist definition. They are the residue of presence, the trace of
moments lived and felt, the attempt to hold onto what is already slipping away.

Honour Mack lives, teaches and maintains a studio practice in Portland, Maine. Born and raised in central New York, she moved to Maine early in her career. Her studio practice focuses on process, perception and transformation. While she primarily focuses on painting, she loves to experiment with a variety of materials and approaches to making work. She feels a deep connection to color and light as conduits for poetic communication and is inspired by nature, science, and the cycle of seasonal changes in New England.