Expand Erupt Disperse, a new exhibit by artist Linda K. Mead, opens with a reception on Saturday, May 7, from 7 to 9 p.m., at the Guttenberg Arts Gallery. The show will be on view until May 31.

Born in Washington, DC, Mead grew up in Northern Virginia at a time of expanding suburban sprawl. After attaining a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Virginia Commonwealth University with a concentration in metals and textiles, she relocated to Germany where she lived for 11 years. She moved to New Jersey in 2002 where after several years she began etching at the Visual Arts Center of New Jersey with Vijay Kumar.

During her time in Germany, Mead gained a better understanding of the relationship between places people find themselves and their relationship to those places. For Mead, Germany was a place where rural and urban, nature and industry, are physically and emotionally hard to separate. This allowed nature to figure into her work, which was also inspired by the hours she spent wandering around the woods and the creek behind her childhood home in Virginia.

Meads original expertise was in jewelry and textile design. She returned to working with metal after spending years as a painter and began embedding images in copper plates, beginning her work as a printmaker and using the etched copper plates as sculptural elements.

Meads current works reflect the present state of the world and the sense of unease that has come with it along with the consequences of human behavior.

My artwork is the culmination of the process of gathering, absorbing and sorting and a fascination with the relationships between what is within and what is without--the seen and unseen, says Mead. It stems from a desire to give form to the undulation and constant state of flux in which we live, from the frenetic and fevered to the still, steadied and silenced.

Guttenberg Arts Gallery is open by appointment only Tuesday through Sunday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. and anytime virtually on their website. You can schedule a visit or view the virtual gallery by going to http://www.guttenbergarts.org/exhibitions.

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New show at Guttenberg Arts Gallery looks at the relationships between people and places - NJ.com