Said, Not Said Nansi Lent
Having been surrounded by neurodivergence and mental health challenges my entire life, I've
devoted myself to studying the brain, communication, consciousness, and spirituality. I am
fascinated by the paradox of living in a world flooded with communication—where words saturate
every medium yet so often fail to convey true meaning. It is akin to the biblical story of Babel. My
paintings and photographs explore this tension through illegible text, abstract calligraphy,
redaction, masking, and digital distortion.
I work with a variety of materials, including inks, brushes, markers, layered colors, mica, acrylic,
vinyl paints, and rubber cement as a resist, on paper and canvas in many sizes. Photographically,
I layer my drawings and paintings with textures and images from the observable world, processing
and distorting them. My artworks are cathartic and poetic, purposefully stripped of semantic
content to signal raw urges from the heart.
Asemic writing—marks that look like language but carry no fixed meaning—is central to my work.
As an antidote to the digitization of our world, it champions traces of script, the language of the
human hand. My intent is to visualize self-talk—the endless inner dialogues we all
experience—and to reflect this universal yet deeply personal conversation in my art.
By obscuring and manipulating textual elements, in Said, Not Said, I mirror the current crisis in
communication. I aim to visualize ways in which, within our own minds and across all cultures, the
most essential truth is that we are more alike than different.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Nansi T. Lent is a painter and photographer from Rhinebeck, NY, with a B.A. in Studio Art from
Boston College and a Master’s in Visual Arts Administration from NYU. Starting as a
photographer, she later turned to painting as a cathartic expression of the soul. Her recent
photography reimagines her paintings.
She has exhibited widely in New York’s Hudson Valley and beyond, including The Katonah
Museum of Art, The Woodstock Artists Association & Museum, and Gallery 40, among others.
Lent has received multiple awards and is represented by BAU Gallery in Beacon while serving on the
Board of Directors at the Woodstock Artists Association & Museum.
