Bio

Delilah Strukel is a MFA student in the San Diego State University painting and printmaking department. She is an interdisciplinary artist working primarily with oil paint, acrylic paint, and ceramics. In 2021 Strukel received her bachelor's degree from San Diego State University in Studio Art’s with summa cum laude. In 2022 She received the Provost Award for her painting “The Paths We Take” and the Dean's Award for her painting “I can Hear the Music”. She also received the President’s Award for her painting “Interenea” in 2023. Each of these paintings is now part of SDSU’s permanent collection. She currently teaches a 2D design class at SDSU as a graduate teaching associate. Strukel has also worked as a muralist since 2017.

Statement

My work invites viewers to explore imaginative micro-words and patterns that are within them. These patterns often consume the canvas or wall mimicking the growth and expansion of decay. The imaginative worlds I create float in between time and space, forcing the viewer to be confronted with biomorphic shapes, textures, and colors that seem to be floating, growing, or moving. My work captures the time it takes for something to go from a physical form to the illusion of nothing. Through enlarging biomorphic images and magnifying the part over the whole, I abstract images of bones decaying, lichen, fungi, and other forms of flora and fauna. I find images and inspiration from the intimate moments I happen upon, while hiking in the mountainous and high desert landscapes of Southern California. The motifs I repeatedly use throughout my work are familiar while also having an ambiguity to them. They have the ability to be grotesque while also appealing which can create a visceral reaction to my work. This same visceral reaction often happens when seeing fruit rotting, blooming of a fungus, or the rotting of a bone. My work highlights spaces of multiplicity, imagination, and beauty within moments of death, decay and rot.