The immigrant is never at home; yet the immigrant has many homes. An immigrant and an artist, born and raised in a remote corner of Oregon's wild and dramatic coast but living for the last 25 years in Scandinavia, Colleen Calhoun came to maturity as an artist in Europe. The immigrant experience of dislocation, yearning for home, and searching for one's place defines her work. But hers has not been a journey of alienation: it is one of exploration and desire, of vivid color, intense desert landscapes and dreamy, saturated seascapes. Trained in classical drawing at the Glyptotek Museum in Copenhagen, in linocut techniques at Copenhagen's Billedskolen, and in literature at the University of Copenhagen, Calhoun has spent the past two decades travelling, drawing, and studying art throughout Europe. At the same time, Calhoun returned again and again to the coast that defined her early years and to the desert lands in which her siblings settled, and these intensely colourful, dramatic landscapes form the world she envisions and explores in her art, as she works through the bleak Scandinavian winter, with its contracted span of gray daylight, its street-dirty snow and bare trees. Calhoun sees in her work a clear progression in terms of the relationship between the body and the landscape it inhabits. Her early work showed the body embedded in the landscape, often in positions of struggle; next, the forms gradually lightened and untangled their stances of tension, beginning to float above the landscape. Now, more often than not, the body, aloft, is only implied in the aerial point of view. Similarly, Calhoun has expanded the space of her artwork from tight linocut blocks to the more open spaces of canvas. A view appears in an airplane window…leaving or returning home? Both, but perhaps only truly at home, aloft.

Art studies: 1977-79 Seattle Pacific University 1981 Classical drawing at Glyptoteket Art Museum, Copenhagen 1982-84 Graphics with graphics artist Mona Chawes 1983-85 Member of The Women’s Gallery, Copenhagen 1984-85 Billedskolen (art school), Copenhagen

Exhibits: Separate and group

Colleen Calhoun, Exhibition Studiestrade, Copenhagen, 2007		Colleen Calhoun, Exhibition Studiestrade, Copenhagen, 2007
Colleen Calhoun, Exhibition Studiestrade, Copenhagen, 2007		Colleen Calhoun, at her studio, 2007